ACTIVE - Knowledge Powered Enterprise

Europe is in transition to a knowledge economy. Effective knowledge management is fundamental to successful economic activity, yet enterprises find it hard to transform much of their essential knowledge into transferable, easily accessible, and actionable knowledge assets. Such hidden knowledge is typically held by individual knowledge workers, being either tacit (unarticulated) or explicit but not widely available (e.g. emails, personal desktop files).   ACTIVE aims to increase the productivity of knowledge workers in a pro-active, contextual, yet easy and unobtrusive way. The aim is to convert tacit and unshared knowledge - the "hidden intelligence" of enterprises - into transferable, interoperable and actionable knowledge to support seamless collaboration and to enable problem solving. A key aspect will be support for informal procedural knowledge - the informal collaboration and problem-solving tasks that drive much knowledge work in the enterprise.   ACTIVE will integrate concepts, methods and tools from the fields of (i) Social Software and Web 2.0, (ii) Semantic Technologies, (iii) Context Mining, Context Modelling, and Context Sensitive Task Management, and (iv) Knowledge Process Mining, Knowledge Process Modelling and Pro-Active Knowledge Process Support into highly innovative application systems. The development will be accompanied by an analysis of key economic and organizational factors and incentive mechanisms, and strongly user-centric system development and evaluation.   The key result of ACTIVE will be a breakthrough which empowers enterprises to make knowledge technology effective for a much larger share of their essential knowledge.   ACTIVE will generate sustainable impact by deploying the tools and applications in three industry sectors: consulting, telecommunication and engineering ("ACTIVE technology"). The added value of ACTIVE technology will be evaluated in economic, organizational, and user studies, which conclude with rigorous field tests. A major focus of ACTIVE will be uptake by industry beyond the immediate consortium.