Collaborative relevance assessment for task-based knowledge support

The operations and management activities of enterprises are mainly task-based and knowledge intensive. Accordingly, an important issue in deploying knowledge management systems is the provision of task-relevant information (codified knowledge) to meet the information needs of knowledge workers during the execution of a task. Codified knowledge extracted from previously executed tasks can provide valuable knowledge about conducting the task-at-hand (current task), and is a valuable information source for constructing a task profile that models a worker's task needs, i.e., information needs for the current task. In this paper, we propose a novel task-relevance assessment approach that evaluates the relevance of previous tasks in order to construct a task profile for the current task. The approach helps knowledge workers assess the relevance of previous tasks through linguistic evaluation and the collaboration of knowledge workers. In addition, applying relevance assessment to a large number of tasks may create an excessive burden for workers. Thus, we propose a novel two-phase relevance assessment method to help workers conduct relevance assessment effectively. Furthermore, a modified relevance feedback technique, which is integrated with the taskrelevance assessment method, is employed to derive the task profile for the task-at-hand. Consequently, task-based knowledge support can be enabled to provide knowledge workers with task-relevant information based on task profiles. Empirical experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach models workers' task-needs effectively and helps provide task-relevant knowledge. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.