Toward incorporating a task-stage identification technique into the long-term document support process

Abstract

Effective knowledge management in a knowledge-intensive environment can place heavy demands on the information filtering (IF) strategies used to model workers' long-term task-needs. Because of the growing complexity of knowledge-intensive work tasks, a profiling technique is needed to deliver task-relevant documents to workers. In this study, we propose an IF technique with task-stage identification that provides effective codification-based support throughout the execution of a task. Task-needs pattern similarity analysis based on a correlation value is used to identify a worker's task-stage (the pre-focus, focus formulation, or post-focus task-stage). The identified task-stage is then incorporated into a profile adaptation process to generate the worker's current task profile. The results of a pilot study conducted in a research institute confirm that there is a low or negative correlation between search sessions and transactions in the pre-focus task-stage, whereas there is at least a moderate correlation between search sessions/transactions in the post-focus stage. Compared with the traditional IF technique, the proposed IF technique with task-stage identification achieves, on average, a 19.49%, improvement in task-relevant document support. The results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method for knowledge-intensive work tasks. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.