Short description of the destination of this part of the EPOS project:

• With e-mail and file folders, bookmark hierarchies etc., knowledge workers already use and continuously maintain a lot of structures that reflect parts their knowledge (e.g., about people and projects), their domain of interest, or world view.
• These structures can be seen as valuable input for organizational knowledge management, but also as a means to personalize information delivery to the user (e.g., by mapping search results onto the specific user's strcuture).
• However, the flexibility that the current mode of interaction with these structures offers, entails also serious drawbacks for the exploitation for automated information services: Parts of the structures are redundant or contradictory, the elements don't have a clear semantics, etc.
• Goal of this project line is to integrate the various native structures of one knowledge workspace into one Personal Information Model (PIM) that on the one hand reflects the personal structures, but on the other hand has a clear formal semantics. These PIM can than be used for knowledge exchange between workspaces and for communication with an Organizational Memory.

Research Topics:

• Specify the Personal Information Model
  • Analysis of exploitable "native structures" and their intended semantics
  • Definition of a representation framework that is sufficient to reflect native structures
  • Techniques for leveraging native structures to the PIM
  • Implementation of the PIM and a communication interface to query and manipulate it
• Framework for Inter-PIM communication
  • Mappings between several Personal Information Models
  • Re-use of fragments from external models
• Integration of Personal Information Models with (organizational) ontologies

The work started in the EPOS project resulted and influenced the work done in the Nepomuk project and there the PIMO (Personal Information Model Ontology)