Using Unified Personal Information in Workspaces

Knowledge work gains more and more importance for the workforce. Thereby knowledge workers (KWers) deal with information personally relevant to them and their work. Furthermore, they use tools to support their work like, e.g., desktop workspaces and specialized applications. However, KWer support is hindered in these applications by personal information fragmentation, i.e., applications needed for a particular activity at hand keep their own set of personal information while not interconnecting this. The KWer faces redundant work to manage this information in several applications and lacks an overview on available information. This thesis shows at hand of two application domains, personal task management and personal meeting management, how to address the personal information fragmentation problem for the support of particular, higher-level KWer activities across individual application boundaries. By using a common unified personal information model and building the applications on top of a personal information management (PIM) system like the recently proposed semantic desktops, e.g., the Nepomuk Social Semantic Desktop, one unified set of a KWer's personal information can be provided across individual applications in a workspace. In particular, this thesis shows a framework with information models, reference architecture and example applications leveraging the former. The information model extends the unified personal information model in the particular domains, i.e., an ontology models respectively the personal task and personal meeting management domain. The reference architecture shows how to efficiently build applications which use unified personal information. The applications for personal task management (Kasimir) and personal meeting management (Nepomuk Meeting Manager) have been designed using this unified personal information and feature methods on how to leverage this information for the KWer. The presented applications have been evaluated with end-users by combining both formative and summative evaluation techniques. Formative usability tests ensured the continuous incorporation of user feedback in the whole design process, ranging from early evaluating design ideas in paper-based prototypes over to evaluating these features in working prototypes of implemented applications. In a summative evaluation, 13 users worked throughout 3.5 weeks with a matured version of the prototype application. This work represents to a large extent an interdisciplinary work among the research fields of semantic web technology, personal information management and human-computer interaction. III Content Overview Content Overview Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... II Content Overview .................................................................................................................................. III Table of