Collaborative tasks using metadata conglomerates : the social part of the semantic desktop

This paper presents an application that enables loose and ad-hoc task collaboration for knowledge work and explicitly integrates task metadata into the collaboration process. With the increasing availability of semantic desktop technology, knowledge workers (KWers) can organize their personal information in a formalized way, including tasks. In an organization, KWers need to collaboratively access task-related information and to collaboratively work on it. In such a scenario, today’s available collaboration support applications, e.g. enterprise collaboration systems like wikis, either sacrifice end-user experience or semantic richness when dealing with structured knowledge. The presented collaborative task management (TM) application circumvents this trade-off by showing how the Kasimir TM client and the Collaborilla collaboration server interact closely. The TM client supports the KWer’s personal TM and incorporates collaborative tasks. It invokes the collaboration server which centrally manages the collaborative tasks. It implements elaborated methods for metadata sharing and collaborative editing of this shared metadata. We present the detailed proposal for an underlying architecture of the application, review related work and conclude this paper by pointing out future work. -- Task Management ; Ad-hoc Collaboration ; Metadata Sharing ; Collaborative Metadata Editing ; Semantic Desktop