Natural technologies for knowledge work: information visualization and knowledge extraction

This paper ‘looks” into one of the most novel knowledge management technology products that has been brought to the market in the recent years. The authors describe two technologies, information visualization and knowledge extraction, for leveraging our natural abilities of vision, language and memory. They discuss a way for exploiting structure that is available in the information system in one case (traditionally called structured) and easily perceived by humans in the other (traditionally called unstructured). The two technologies focus on the two sides of this goal, respectively. They demonstrate the value of these technologies in supporting interaction with much larger amounts of information than was possible with previous graphical interfaces and in guiding access and use of the information and often for automating portions of the work.