A Lightweight Approach for Proactive, Task-Specific Information Delivery Harald Holz, Heiko Maus, Ansgar Bernardi, Oleg Rostanin (DFKI GmbH – German Research Center for AI, Germany <firstname>.<lastname>@dfki.de) Abstract: Knowledge management approaches for weakly-structured, ad-hoc knowl- edge work processes need to be lightweight, i.e., they cannot rely on high upfront mod- eling effort. This paper presents a novel prototype for supporting weakly-structured processes by integrating a standard to-do list application with a state-of-the-art docu- ment classification system. The resulting system allows for a task-oriented view on an office worker’s personal knowledge space in order to realize a proactive and context- sensitive information support during her daily, knowledge-intensive tasks. Key Words: Weakly-structured workflows, agile workflows, proactive information de- livery Category: H.3.3, I.2.0 1 Motivation The recent emergence and popularity of several new desktop search engines such as Google Desktop Search 1 , x-friend 2 , MSN Desktop Search 3 , etc. has clearly shown the need for tools that help users in managing their personal knowledge space (PKS). Typically, the documents needed by a knowledge worker for the task at hand are spread over various places such as e-mail folders, file system folders, or paper stacks on the desk. While the concept of a desktop-wide search certainly relieves the user from the burden of querying several different infor- mation sources (e-mail, local and network drives, etc.), current desktop search engines still follow the standard, passive query/retrieve model: the user has to explicitly ’pull’ for information that might be relevant for a task he is currently trying to accomplish. Besides being inefficient, empirical studies have shown that such pull approaches typically lead to suboptimal reuse rates of available documents [Mahe and Rieu, 1997]. In order to address this issue, several business process-oriented knowledge management approaches have been developed for proactively providing pro- cess participants with information that is relevant with regard to their cur- rent tasks [Abecker et al., 2002]. However, as most of these approaches rely on 1 http://desktop.google.com/ 2 http://www.x-friend.de/ 3 http://toolbar.msn.com/