Organization of digital resources as an original facet for exploring the quiescent information capital of a community

Abstract

Knowledge workers organize the documents they need for daily task achievement in their personal information spaces (PISs). For a community, people’s PISs constitute in-house value-added resources. Paradoxically, this information source is poorly exploited, as people tend to use external sources (e.g., the Web), although this is probably poorly appropriate in corporate context. This article tackles such information access issues in the common context. Our contribution consists in a faceted visual interface to explore various facets (points of view) of the information of a community, which remains quiescent otherwise. Besides common facets only based on information contents, we propose a new facet relying on the way users in a community manage and organize information. As a result, our approach exploits knowledge workers’ efforts devoted to PIS management, turning them to profit for all, by fostering mutual benefit between stakeholders. The proposed facet relies on an original organization-based similarity measure that we define and experiment.