Towards Ontology-based Information Extraction and Annotation of Paper Documents for Personalized Knowledge Acquisition

Despite the advent of electronic personal information management (PIM) tools, knowledge workers are still heavily using paper-based information sources. But up to now, even in sophisticated tools for PIM such as the Semantic Desktop, the knowledge workers’ paper world is still neglected. Thus, electronic archiving of a web page for later reference is much easier than taking care of an interesting article in a magazine—whose copy might set dust on the user’s shelf and will long be forgotten when it would be helpful for a specific task. This paper presents how to use document analysis, ontology-based information extraction, and annotation techniques for personal knowledge acquisition in order to bridge the gap between the user’s paper world and his personal knowledge space in the Semantic Desktop. A recent prototype shows the feasibility of the approach.