Towards Goal Elicitation by User Observation

Knowledge workers put a lot of effort during every day’s work in structuring their own information. This is often done with the help of email tools, file directories, or bookmarks. The recently started research project EPOS1 investigates ways to assist users in providing adequate and task-specific support. The envisioned system will observe the user’s work as well as his ways of information handling and automatically learn and identify his goals, intentions, structures, ontologies, and work processes. Towards the user, a sophisticated knowledge workspace shall act as an adaptive assistant proposing follow-up working steps and providing (how-to) information as well as relevant documents. In order to do so, the assistant needs to know about the user’s current context. One part of that context is the user’s current goal. The user goals are represented by task concepts which are concepts in an ontology. We propose to use Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) techniques to predict the user’s goal(s) from a sequence of his workspace (inter-) actions needed to achieve this goal. 1 Assisting Knowledge-Intensive Work Knowledge workers [Davenport and Prusak, 1998] put a lot of effort during everyday’s work in structuring their own information. This is often done with the help of email tools, file directories, or bookmarks, but the way this is done depends highly on the individual manner of working. Contrary to that are the knowledge management goals of a company: global collection, structuring and distribution of knowledge. Hence, there is a gap between the global benefits for the organization and the personal benefits for the individual knowledge worker. While the organization asks for universally applicable, standardized and persistent structures, processes, etc. to achieve and maintain universally accessible information archives, the individual knowledge worker requests his common, individualized structures and flexibility in processes and work organization in order to reach optimal support for his activities. Therefore, the recently started research project EPOS [Dengel et al., 2002] investigates a bottom-up evolutionary approach to narrow this gap. The individual knowledge workspace is realized mainly by a set of applications running on the user’s personal Evolving Personal to Organizational knowledge Spaces, http://www.dfki. de/epos computer. In order to provide adequate and task-specific support to the human, the system will observe the work and the users’ ways of information handling and automatically learn and identify his goals, intentions, structures, ontologies, and work processes. Towards the user, the knowledge workspace shall act as an adaptive, contextaware assistant proposing follow-up working steps and providing (how-to) information, as well as, relevant documents. Therefore, the assistant needs to know about the user’s current context which has, according to [Maus, 2001; Turner et al., 2001], many components, dimensions, or contextual aspects. In order to be really useful for the user, the assistant has to be as unintrusive as possible, i.e., most of the context should be gathered from observing the user instead of depending on being fed explicitly by the user. EPOS will observe the user at his daily work on his PC and elicit as much user context as possible out of this observation. This context information will then be used for context-sensitive assistance functionality. The paper is organized in the following way: In section 2 we introduce a hierarchy of four abstraction levels of user activities, followed by an example that guides through the four levels in section 3. Then, we describe the knowledge sources we deem important from a more technical view in section 4 before we sketch our proposed goal elicitation approach using Case-Based Reasoning techniques in section 5. We close the paper with a brief discussion of open issues and an outlook on further work of the EPOS project team. 2 Four Abstraction Levels of User Activity Figure 1 depicts four different levels of user activity: The first level, called Workspace Level, represents the operating system and the applications that provide access to files, objects and information structures. Observation at this level results in workspace events such as various mouse clicks, entering of some text, or starting and handling applications. The user’s momentary intentions, expressed by his user actions, are independent of the currently used workspace. The User Action Level, thus, contains such user actions as create new text document or revise document , rather than atomic mouse-clicks or actions like start text editor or activate File-new menu. Those user actions will be inferred from a series of workspace events described before. We do not address this in this paper. This is another part of research of the EPOS project. While the user tries to solve his problems with the OS and some applications, he always has some higher medium-