News
HERMES SoftLab, member of the ComTrade Group, is developing new technology for knowledge powered enterprises with European partners within the framework of the European research project ACTIVE
European project ACTIVE – Unlocking knowledge worker productivity
Ljubljana, June 20, 2008 – HERMES SoftLab and Institute “Jožef Štefan” are part of the European research project ACTIVE, which has begun developing new technology to increase productivity in knowledge based companies. ACTIVE is an integrated project co-financed by the European Commission. The aim of the project is development of an integrated contextualized workspace, which could enable access to implicit and hidden knowledge within a company. In the newly developed workspace such knowledge becomes expressed, usable and transferable among company employees. The ACTIVE project is led by a consortium of 12 European partners, leading players from the industry and academia.
Knowledge based companies are increasingly facing the challenge of needing to increase productivity and competitiveness. Current information systems, however, do not provide sufficient support for dealing with this challenge. Sharing information is cumbersome and time consuming and there is minimal support for informal knowledge processes. ACTIVE aims to overcome these deficiencies. Partners of project ACTIVE are developing a solution to enable easy knowledge sharing and support informal processes of knowledge management and create a smooth workflow based on contextualized information.
In the consumer world, services such as flickr and del.icio.us have proven that information can easily be shared with other users by using easy-to-use informal tags. Project ACTIVE aims to combine this approach with a more rigorous approach to knowledge sharing normally used in organizations and get the best of both worlds – formal and informal.
Knowledge processes are usually created on the fly as an answer to a present need. As a result, such processes are soon forgotten even by their creators, only to re-invent them if needed. ACTIVE aims to capture these processes, so they can be re-used by their creators and others – an important part of sharing the hidden intelligence in companies. Knowledge workers want filtered information, allowing them easier access to relevant data and filtering out the irrelevant. The solution lies in work context management. ACTIVE learns an user’s context and adapts the user experience to the current context of the worker. The project will achieve this by developing the “ACTIVE Knowledge Workspace” environment, combining web 2.0 applications with context-based and semantic technologies. The “ACTIVE Knowledge Workspace” is more than a mere adaptation of existing software, it is a total integration of separate solutions into a new whole.
Gregor Smrekar, CEO, HERMES SoftLab: “The ACTIVE Knowledge Workspace environment will significantly improve the efficiency and effect of knowledge workers in their knowledge management tasks. It will increase the power of informal knowledge sharing that traditionally took place over a cup of coffee. At HERMES SoftLab we firmly believe that this technology will be take up in knowledge-based companies in Europe and beyond. The importance of this project is clearly shown through the cooperation of other project partners such as British Telecommunications, Accenture, Eurescom – European Institute for Research and Strategis Studies in Telecommunications, Microsoft European Innovation Center and others.”
Marko Grobelnik, researcher, “Jožef Stefan” Institute: “The ACTIVE project has great appeal from a research viewpoint as it combines a number of new innovations in the field of text analysis, social networks and semantic web into an integrated analytical environment for increasing company productivity. We expect the project and its strong scientific and technical team to bring outstanding results which will be used in practice all around the world.”
The results of project ACTIVE will be able to assist and knowledge-based business, but the project will see its first application in three industrial fields – consulting, telecommunications and electrical engineering.
Website and list of project ACTIVE partners: www.active-project.eu.