Two Information Brokering Service Environments undergo Pilot Tests
by Roland Klemke and Alexander Sigel
Information brokering or mediation of high-quality information
is a complex intellectual activity which cannot be fully replaced
by automated methods. However, appropriate service environments
can considerably alleviate the experts’ tasks and augment their
productivity. Therefore, with the long-term vision of user-tailored
information environments in mind, the information brokering group
at GMD’s Institute for Applied Information Technology has developed
two instances of information brokering service environments in
close cooperation and with involvement of end users. The prototypes
are currently evaluated in the field under near-realistic conditions.
Exploitation activities are under way.
Information brokers - trying to match their clients’ ill-structured
information needs with information offers from networked information
resources - are faced with new challenges: especially information
overload and hard to use information systems aggravate or even
impede the brokers’ tasks to survey all potentially useful sources
in their domain and judge them for relevance and quality, as well
as to stay familiar with the different and ever changing categorisation
schemes.
User-tailored information environments have the potential to better
support humans in adding value by collaboratively collecting,
creating, processing, storing, and disseminating information objects.
They allow eg for the explicit collection of certain meta information
about sources like content, accessibility, quality, and usefulness,
as well as categorisation schemes used. Furthermore, they provide
functionalities to associate roles with tasks to be performed.
To investigate where and by which methods professional mediators
can best be assisted by integrated brokering environments - a
special case of user-tailored information environments - in all
core tasks, our group has built two prototypes over the last two
years.
In the first project (ELFI), the brokers are funding consultants
at German universities and research centers whose task is to provide
their clientele with a timely, well-focused awareness and search
service about funding opportunities. The second project (COBRA),
which aims at building a general reference model of information
brokering, realised the prototype bizzyB. The bizzyB system is
currently evaluated in two versions: One for brokers at the Milan
Chambers of Commerce who are responsible for bringing complementary
companies into contact, ie business-to- business brokering. The
second version is used by brokers at County Durham TEC in Durham,
who broker information about people and programmes aimed at encouraging
economic developments in an underdeveloped region.
Our systems aim to be “one-stop-shops” for the information brokering
process. Therefore, functions are offered to produce collections
of metadata, and to adequately describe/classify information needs
and offerings. The systems provide access to various heterogeneous,
domain-specific sources, automatically translate and present data
sets in a uniform format, and help users to browse/select/filter
large data sets, which facilitates decision making. The two systems
have specific interfaces for all roles/tasks that occur in the
information brokering process. All relevant information objects
are organised in a task-specific manner. Co-operative brokering
processes are supported by communication means and sharing meta-information.
A central concept in both developments is the collection and utilisation
of meta-information to support retrieval, selection, and distribution
of relevant information. Access agents use these collections of
meta-information for queries to information sources, and presentation
agents display the gathered information according to user roles
and usage contexts.
Our work also resulted in a component-based open brokering architecture
that makes it now viable to create domain-specific brokering environments
for different brokering scenarios and configurations.
Real users of the two domains currently test and evaluate the
prototypes under near-realistic conditions in order to improve
our software, as well as to help us to understand the problems
in the brokering domains better. In addition we are eg interested
in the impact our assistance systems have on the brokers’ workflow.
A first positive result is the adoption of the prototypes by our
user population. The fact that an increasing number of users integrate
our prototypes into their work indicates that people find the
system useful for their daily work. Therefore, commercial exploitation
activities are under way.
More information is available at:
- http://zeus.gmd.de/cobra/
- http://zeus.gmd.de/projects/elfi.html
Please contact:
Christoph G. Thomas - GMD
Tel: +49 2241 14 2640
E-mail: Christoph.Thomas@gmd.de
Roland Klemke/Achim Nick - GMD
Tel: +49 2241 14 2398
E-mail: Roland.Klemke@gmd.de, Achim.Nick@gmd.de
Hans-Guenter Lindner - humanIT GmbH
E-mail: info@humanit.de
http://www.humanit.de
