Infotop - A Shared-context Information Workspace

Knowledge workers collaborate in teams, networks and communities in order to accomplish knowledge processes. They have to be supported with adequate organizational as well as information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructures. From an ICT perspective, requirements are changed when compared to more traditional (office) work due to the considerable higher com-plexity of data, the focus on communication across the boundaries of corporate ICT infrastructures and the mobility of personally responsible knowledge work-ers. This requires the systematic handling of context and substantially extended functionality for collaboration in the knowledge workers' personal workspaces. In this paper, we discuss knowledge work and outline typical knowledge processes in which knowledge workers collaborate. We then consider techno-logical support for the personal management of information, of web content, of collaboration and of knowledge. Eventually, we propose Infotop, a shared-context information workspace that organizes knowledge resources within six dimensions. We show how Infotop can be used to support typical knowledge processes and discuss some implementation aspects of a prototype workspace.