Heiko Maus

Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz | DFKI · Smart Data & Knowledge Services

Information overload resulting from the ever faster growing mass of digital data makes knowledge work more and more complex. Being able to not get distracted and focus on what is currently relevant consumes valuable cognitive resources. Support by intelligent assistance software might alleviate this problem. We report two experiments that addressed...

During the last decades, recommender systems have played a remarkable role in putting one step further toward making content platforms more intelligent in a wide variety of domains ranging from music and movies to books and documents. Notwithstanding the various applications of recommender systems, not many contributions have been made regarding th...

Small and medium-sized enterprises increasingly adopt electronic invoices and digitized purchase-to-pay processes. A purchase-to-pay process begins with making a purchase order and ends with completing the payment process. Even when organizations adopt electronic invoices, knowledge work in such processes is characterized by assimilating informatio...

Today’s dynamic business environment requires enterprises to be agile in order to remain competitive. Competition also impacts enterprise modeling (EM) aiming at the systematic development of the enterprise’s business processes, organizational structures, and information systems. Although EM is a mature discipline, organizations still do not exploi...

Inhibition is one of the core concepts in Cognitive Psychology. The idea of inhibitory mechanisms actively weakening representations in the human mind has inspired a great number of studies in various research domains. In contrast, Computer Science only recently has begun to consider inhibition as a second basic processing quality beside activation...

Inhibition is one of the core concepts in Cognitive Psychology. The idea of inhibitory mechanisms actively weakening representations in the human mind has inspired a great number of studies in various research domains. In contrast, Computer Science only recently has begun to consider concepts such as digital forgetting or suppression of irrelevant...

Knowledge workers face an ever increasing flood of informa- tion in their daily lives. To counter this and provide better support for information management and knowledge work in general, we have been investigating solutions inspired by human forgetting since 2013. These solutions are based on Semantic Desktop (SD) and Managed Forgetting(MF) techno...

A growing number of applications users daily interact with have to operate in (near) real-time: chatbots, digital companions, knowledge work support systems -- just to name a few. To perform the services desired by the user, these systems have to analyze user activity logs or explicit user input extremely fast. In particular, text content (e.g. in...

Trends like digital transformation even intensify the already overwhelming mass of information knowledge workers face in their daily life. To counter this, we have been investigating knowledge work and information management support measures inspired by human forgetting. In this paper, we give an overview of solutions we have found during the last...

Trends like digital transformation even intensify the already overwhelming mass of information knowledge workers face in their daily life. To counter this, we have been investigating knowledge work and information management support measures inspired by human forgetting. In this paper, we give an overview of solutions we have found during the last...

Knowledge workers face an ever increasing flood of information in their daily lives. To counter this and provide better support for information management and knowledge work in general, we have been investigating solutions inspired by human forgetting since 2013. These solutions are based on Semantic Desktop (SD) and Managed Forgetting (MF) technol...

Current trends, like digital transformation and ubiquitous computing, yield in massive increase in available data and information. In artificial intelligence (AI) systems, capacity of knowledge bases is limited due to computational complexity of many inference algorithms. Consequently, continuously sampling information and unfiltered storing in kno...

Existing Semantic Desktops are still reproached for being too complicated to use or not scaling well. Besides, a real "killer app" is still missing. In this paper, we present a new prototype inspired by NEPOMUK and its successors having a semantic graph and ontologies as its basis. In addition, we introduce the idea of context spaces that users can...

Existing Semantic Desktops are still reproached for being too complicated to use or not scaling well. Besides, a real "killer app" is still missing. In this paper, we present a new prototype inspired by NEPOMUK and its successors having a semantic graph and ontologies as its basis. In addition, we introduce the idea of context spaces that users can...

Multimedia content and especially personal multimedia content is created in abundance today. Short- to mid-term storage of this content is typically no problem due to decreased storage prices and the availability of storage services. However, for the long-term perspective, i.e., preservation, adequate technologies and best practices for keeping the...

Chapter 1 detailed the need for preservation especially for our personal life. Even so, it is not part of most users’ regular practice. Preservation challenges users with a manual effort and a somewhat stern discipline to continuously perform the required steps. Being aware of these challenges, the chapter will present the novel approach realized i...

- Jüngste Erfolge im Bereich der Künstlichen Intelligenz zeigen das hohe Potential zur Verarbeitung großer Informationsmengen und zur intelligenten Automatisierung von kognitiv anspruchsvollen Tätigkeiten durch selbstlernende Algorithmen. - Basistechniken der Künstlichen Intelligenz haben in vielen Bereichen bereits eine hohe technische Reife errei...

With an increasing amount of available sensors lifelogging produces more and more data. Thus, realizing necessary condensation and forgetting processes becomes a challenge. In the last three years we investigated Managed Forgetting, Synergetic Preservation and Contextualized Remembering in the so-called ForgetIT project. Using the Semantic Desktop...

Despite developments of Semantic Web-enabling technologies, the gap between non-expert end-users and the Semantic Web still exists. In the field of semantic content authoring, tools for interacting with semantic content remain directed at highly trained individuals. This adds to the challenges of bringing user-generated content into the Semantic We...

With the growing amount of content stored in personal and organizational information spaces, finding and re-finding documents becomes both more crucial and challenging. In this work, we propose an approach to reduce information overload in navigation by automatically focusing on important documents, adaptively to the tasks at hand. Based on the ide...

The World Wide Web has been rapidly developing in the last decade. In recent years, the Semantic Web has gained a lot of traction. It is a vision of the Web where data is understandable by machines as well as humans. Developments in the Semantic Web made way for the creation of massive knowledge bases containing a wealth of structured information....

Preserving photos for future generations is difficult in the digital age, as both storage media and storage formats become obsolete within decades. In order to inform the design of a photo preservation service, we are currently collecting information about relevant practices in a large survey. In this paper, we report intermediate results from a sa...

An object detection method that is provided with a step for extracting a plurality of reference feature vectors related to a local area from an image representing an object, and extracting a plurality of query feature vectors related to the local area from a search query image; a step for matching each query feature vector against each reference fe...

The paper presents recent developments in our research on Semantic Desktop for personal knowledge management supported by an ecosystem of applications and plug-ins using the knowledge worker’s Personal Information Model (PIMO) – a formal representation of his mental model for knowledge work – in everyday applications. We explain how the infrastruct...

MS Outlook is currently the most widespread e-mail client in corporate environments. However, e-mail management with MS Outlook is usually decoupled from enterprise processes, making it difficult to synchronize e-mails and attachments with currently running processes. In this paper, we introduce SmartOffice - an extension for MS Outlook allowing th...

In this paper we develop a prototype of an image management system supporting the user organizing his images with the help of semantic annotations. The system automatically contributes such annotations to close the gap between images and concepts expressing their content. We propose a novel integration into a Semantic Desktop and the usage of Wikip...

Although the Semantic Desktop paradigm has great potential, new users have to face the cold-start problem. Having to start with empty models is a barrier to any semantic technology and filling them with world-known concepts does not work for personal models. We propose to analyze the email database of a user and extract concepts of multiple types t...

In this paper, we introduce a concept, which focuses on innovative commercial system implementations reflecting process-embedded events from the Internet of Things. The developed concepts are derived from experiences applying recent research advances to industry scenarios. The rationale behind the overall concept is twofold: while transparency is i...

During the last decade, a plenty of approaches for intelligent user assistance in knowledge intensive working environments were developed. These solutions vary from a lightweight proactive information delivery (PID) based on a non-intrusive user observation to workflow-based assistance that requires formal modeling of processes, organizations, know...

In knowledge work, users are confronted with difficulties in remembering, retrieving, and accessing relevant information and knowledge for their task at hand. In addition, knowledge-intensive, task-oriented work is highly fragmented and, therefore, requires knowledge workers to effectively handle and recover from interruptions. The Semantic Deskto...

The paper presents an approach to support knowledge-intensive tasks with a context-sensitive task management system that is integrated into the user's personal knowledge space represented in the Nepomuk Semantic Desktop. The context-sensitive assistance is based on the combination of user observation, agile task modelling, automatic task prediction...

This article describes the Semantic Desktop. We give insights into the core services that aim to improve personal knowledge management on the desktop. We describe these core components of our Semantic Desktop system and give evaluation results. Results of a long-term study reveal effects of using the Semantic Desktop on personal knowledge work.

This article describes the Semantic Desktop. We give insights into the core services that aim to improve personal knowledge management on the desktop. We describe these core components of our Semantic Desktop system and give evaluation results. Results of a long-term study reveal effects of using the Semantic Desktop on personal knowledge work.

This paper presents an architecture for accessing distributed services with embedded systems using message oriented middleware. For the service discovery a recommendation system using case-based reasoning methods is utilized. The main idea is to take the context of each user into consideration in order to suggest appropriate services. We define our...

With an increasing amount of images a user would li ke to keep and share the desire for an adequate management for these images raises. The normal folder structure wh ich is available on nowadays computers can fulfill this ta sk only non satisfying. Often an image contains more indivi dual information than can be expressed by a hierarchical tree. W...

Despite the progress in personal information manage-ment, the desks of knowledge workers have remained un-touched, justified by the claim that the paperless office is im-minent. This led to a huge gap between the electronic world and the physical world. This paper combines the Semantic Desktop, methods of desk organization, and user observa-tion to...

Despite the advent of electronic personal information management (PIM) tools, knowledge workers are still heavily using paper-based information sources. But up to now, even in sophisticated tools for PIM such as the Semantic Desktop, the knowledge workers' paper world is still neglected. Thus, electronic archiving of a web page for later reference...

This work outlines system and usage principles of the ontology-based information extraction system iDocument. Ontology-based information extraction reuses existing domain knowledge for extracting and annotating relevant information from domain-related text. iDocument provides an architecture, an API, and a user interface for supporting users and de...

To let a user know the user's personal trend on the user's computer, this paper proposes a method to explore and visualize one's personal trend on the premise that the Gnowsis semantic desktop is used. The proposed method classifies information items into four attention areas with a popularity change measure by using three indicators (direct attent...

The demo shows how a user is easily able to semanti- cally annotate and enrich scanned documents with concepts from his personal knowledge space. This bridges the gap between paper documents and the approach of a Semantic Desktop, where each information object on the user's com- puter desktop is semantically described by means of ontolo- gies.

Many initiatives to introduce knowledge management in companies fail, because they are not integrated in the employees' daily work processes and do not adequately support their knowledge-intensive tasks. The work in hand presents potentials of workflow management systems -- in spite of their primary focus to process automation -- for the process-o...

In this paper we present lessons learned from building a Se- mantic Desktop system, the gnowsis beta. On desktop computers, se- mantic software has to provide stable services and has to reflect the personal view of the user. Our approach to ontologies, the Personal In- formation Model PIMO allows to create tagging services like del.icio.us on the d...

In this work we present the results of the EPOS project with regard to the needs of personalization in the Semantic Web. Focus of this work is the subjective view of an individual person, expressed in a Personal Information Model (PIMO). It is matched both with personal resources (files, e-mails, and websites) of the user and organizational knowled...

In this paper, we will introduce BRITE, an Integrated Project sponsored by the European Union starting in 2006. The aim of BRITE is to exploit Semantic Web technologies in order to enable interoperation in a transnational scenario, namely processes between institutions that concert the registration of businesses in the European Union. While technic...

Die Arbeitswelt zukünftiger Wissensarbeiter wird in zunehmendem Maße durch die Dimensionen Mobilität, Verteiltheit und Kollaboration, sowie explizite Einbettung in Arbeitsziele und Prozesse charakterisiert. Die Anforderungen flexibler, räumlich und zeitlich verteilter, ggf. globaler Arbeitsorganisation einerseits und die technischen Möglichkeiten m...

Knowledge work processes consist of interleaved agile, weakly-structured processes and strictly-structured processes. Knowledge management approaches for weakly-structured, ad-hoc knowledge work processes need to be lightweight, i.e., they cannot rely on high upfront modeling effort. However, approaches for business process- oriented knowledge mana...

Office workers tend to produce paper piles of documents to read or to process sometime later. The information contained in these piles is often lost if it is not transferred to electronic format and connected to knowledge structures. Information that is not part of the knowledge worker's electronic information space is frequently overlooked because...

Traditional process-oriented knowledge management (KM) approaches are inadequate for highly dynamic and volatile processes, whose steps cannot be planned in advance, and during which new, unanticipated “knowledge needs” frequently arise: such processes handle mostly informal documents and rely on face-to-face communication between participants. Dur...

Requirements resulting from knowledge intensive work go beyond what is provided by classical workflow management regarding process flexibility and integration into the personal task management. This is demonstrated considering the example of Engineering Change Requests (ECR), handled by an integrated workflow as provided by SAP's Product Lifecycle...

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...

Typical arguments for the use of agent technology in business in-formation systems rely on the heterogeneity of the information landscape, the physical distribution of its components, and the overall complexity of such systems. In the domain of IT support for Knowledge Management, these claims for agent systems typically also hold, but additionally...

Knowledge-intensive activities can typically not be modeled sufficiently by classical, static process models and workflows. To enable a process-oriented knowledge management approach under these circumstances, the concept of weakly-structured workflows has been developed. This approach integrates process modeling and workflow enactment and facilita...

Neben Arbeit, Boden und Kapital hat sich das Wissen als ein wichtiger Produktionsfaktor etabliert (vgl. Probst et al. 1998, S. 17f.).9 Im Gegensatz zu vielen anderen Produktionsfaktoren steigert sich sein Wert mit der Häufigkeit der Nutzung; es entwickelt seinen Wert nur durch ständiges Anwenden und Weiterentwickeln.

Seit Mitte der 90er Jahre gewinnt Wissensmanagement (WM) als ganzheitlicher Ansatz zur Verbesserung der Innovationsfähigkeit, der Prozesseffizienz und der Anpassungsfähigkeit an standig wechselnde Anforderungen zunehmende Bedeutung in Unternehmen und Organisationen (vgl. Nonaka u. Takeuchi 1997; Probst et al. 1997; Davenport u. Prusak 1998). Der vo...

Die Verfügbarkeit neuer technischer Möglichkeiten, wie insbesondere Intranets, war eine wichtige treibende Kraft beim Erfolg der „Wissensmanagement-Welle“ der letzten Jahre. Dennoch hat WM als neue Disziplin wenig Innovationskraft auf die Kerninformatik ausgeiibt. Davenport et al. (1996) berichten bspw. schon von einer Reihe erfolgreicher Wlvl-Lösu...

Erfolgreiches Wissensmanagement setzt voraus, dass es in die tägliche Arbeit integriert ist, wie sie durch die Geschäftsprozesse eines Unternehmens vorgegeben wird. Wissensmanagement muss deshalb als integraler Bestandteil von Geschäftsprozessen und deren Gestaltung betrachtet werden. Wissen ist für ein Unternehmen relevant, wenn es die Geschäftspr...

The paper presents Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) as valuable information sources for context information for accomplishing intelligent information support. First, the main advantages of WfMS for retrieving context are presented. Two projects from our research department show di#erent approaches for retrieving workflow context and enabling an i...

The integration of a document analysis and understanding (DAU) system in workflow management systems (WFMS) allows to bridge the gap between paper documents and workflow management enabled business processes. With this integration it will be possible to assign the incoming business letters to the correct workflow instance, to support the data captu...

uberwiegend auf abgeschlossene oder laufende Forschungsprojekte in der Forschungsgruppe Wissenmanagement am Deutschen Forschungszentrum fur Kunstliche Intelligenz, bezieht aber auch die aktuelle Literatur im Bereich Softwareunterstutzung fur WM mit ein. Als 'Nebenpro- dukt' versuchen wir dabei den Forschungsansatz unserer Arbeitsgruppe zu illustrie...