My research and knowledge workers

Just had a very interesting conversation on how my research could help knowledge workers, e.g., people responsible for producing documentation in large corporations.

I have to say, I am glad that whatever I wrote here helped someone make this association with their work to my research. To be frank, when I invented notitio.us 2 years ago, knowledge workers were among those people I was thinking about.

Why ? Simply – back than http://notitio.us/, and now http://digi.me/ provides three important features:

1. Users can classify their knowledge using controlled vocabularies (not just tags!).
2. They can create local taxonomies representing their knowledge, using categories they created themselves or that were created by their friends.
3. Users stay up to date by getting recommendations through classifications maintained by others; system also recommends classifications users would not otherwise find within their social network.

In case of producing documentation, a knowledge worker has to (among others):

1. Find appropriate information items that would make up the content of the document being produced.
2. Be aware of related information items to provide accurate references.
3. Be able to find experts (or at least some notes they prepared) in order to solve certain problems described in the documentation.

How do solutions like digi.me can help ?

1. They help knowledge workers organize their knowledge in a more collaborative and structural way.
2. They help to find requested items more easily, including related information.
3. Using recommendations and the social semantic collaborative filtering technique users can find experts  in certain topic.

Where they cannot help ?
The only problem I see at the moment is that digi.me was built to help organize linked content. It is not a CMS solution like JeromeDL. At the same time if a knowledge worker wants to easily tap onto notes produced by a field expert, he/she will need something more than just CMS. I am thinking about Semantic Desktop solutions, especially Nepomuk.

Where can we go from here?
I hope I will be able to investigate this topic much further. It would be very interesting to see a custom build of digi.me, combined with a Nepomuk (or a similar engine) and various user interface components (some of which we have developed within Corrib.org) to improve discovery and managing of information items.