Peer-to-Peer Information Workspaces in Infotop

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 technological (ICT) infrastructures. From an ICT perspective, requirements have changed when compared to more traditional (office) work due to the considerable higher complexity of data, the focus on communication across the boundaries of corporate ICT infrastructures and the mobility of knowledge workers. This requires the systematic handling of context and substantially extended functionality for collaboration in the knowledge workers’ personal workspaces. In this paper, we outline typical knowledge processes and discuss ICT support for the personal management of information, of web content, of collaboration and of knowledge. We present Infotop, a tool that supports the creation and management of shared-context information workspaces and organizes knowledge resources in a peer-to-peer (p2p) architecture. We show how Infotop can be used to support typical knowledge work processes and discuss its dimensions, its user interface, its shared context workspaces, its architecture, and some thoughts on a prototype implementation currently under development.