Navigation Space Formalism and Exploration of Knowledge Worker Behavior on Intranet Peter G ´ ECZY, Noriaki IZUMI, Shotaro AKAHO, Kˆ oiti HASIDA National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology Tsukuba and Tokyo, Japan Abstract: Elucidation of human behavior in electronic environments is vital for managerial and mar- keting purposes, resource allocation, and design of efficient and user friendly WEB based platforms and services. The article presents a novel formalism allowing effective extraction and examination of human behavioral patterns at elementary and more complex levels. The approach was applied to extraction and analysis of knowledge workers browsing behavior on a large corporate Intranet. Several relevant behavioral characteristics of knowledge workers have been revealed. We demonstrated also user classificationand projections to various observation domains which enable further knowledge discovery about user browsing attributes. 1 Introduction ”Nobody has really looked at productivity in white collar work in a scientific way.” (Peter Drucker) [1]. Scarcity of scientific evidence regarding knowledge worker productivity, effi- ciency, and their relevant metrics have been the central point of recent managerial discourse [2]. Exploration of human dynamics [3] and behavior in web based environments [4] have been attracting significant attention in a corporate sector. Elucidation of human interactions and behavior in electronic spaces requires establishment of novel formalism. Traditional graph based models of world wide web [5] and related mod- eling approaches [6] are becoming inadequate in capturing dynamic interactions and human behavior in the context of recent technological trends. Dynamically generated hypertext documents, search engines, collaborative filtering [7], and recommender systems [8] induce constant changes in connectedness. We propose a novel construct of navigation space that overcomes the above mentioned difficulties and effectively captures dimensions of human in- teractions. The navigation space incorporates essential navigational elements and segments of behavior. It encompasses both topological and temporal characteristics of human behavior in WEB based environments, allows categorization of users with similar browsing behavior, and permits projections of user clusters to various interest domains. Presented work demonstrates application of navigation space formalism in analyzing knowl- edge worker browsing behavior and classification on a large corporate Intranet. Exploratory analysis of human navigation space exposed relevant behavioral characteristics of knowledge workers. Future perspective of this approach targets development of the next generation of user assistance services in electronic spaces in fusion with content based analysis and search. 163 Proceedings of iiWAS2006