An Overview of Information Management and Knowledge Work Studies: Lessons for the Semantic Desktop
Proceedings of the 2nd Semantic Desktop and Social Semantic Collaboration Workshop at 5th International Semantic Web Conference at 5th International Semantic Web Conference, Athens, GA, USA, (November 2006)Abstract
Several recent initiatives aim to provide a Memex-inspired semantic desktop that would integrate with or replace our current physical and electronic desktop. For these semantic desktop initiatives to succeed, we need to consider how people organise their work and use their desktop. If we do not consider this existing work, the semantic desktop might very well suffer from the low adoption rate that is visible in other personal information management solutions 32. The contribution of this paper is not technical, but presents an overview of relevant semantic desktop literature from the personal information management and human-computer interaction domains. We extract six practical lessons: focus on the individual, forget rigid classifications, follow the links, remember the context, value the power of paper, and keep it simple.
