Making Sense of the Unkown: Knowledge Dissemination in Organizations

Within corporations, opportunities are missed and efforts can be duplicated due to the relevant information not being known by the appropriate individuals. Often, an employee does not even know that relevant information might be uncovered by searching the corporate intranet. In this paper we present a context-sensitive aid to sensemaking by providing relevant information to an individual in an unobtrusive form, allowing the user to maintain focus on their current task, but to still be aware of related documents. We gather the relevant information based on keywords extracted from the user’s currently-displayed email message and filter the results using the user’s history and profile information. The information is displayed in the periphery of the user interface.