Towards the use of user-centric meta-knowledge in applying organizational memory to email communications

The communicative act in a learning organization is subject to a number of threats to its validity (Habermas 1981), in particular the comprehensibility, truth, trustworthiness, and appropriateness of a given message. Organizational Memories can be used to address these threats. Our focus is on email communications which suffers from the same threats identified by Habermas. The integration of email with an Organizational Memory can improve the quality of communication by applying people-centric meta-knowledge to appropriately link a given message to the OM. In this paper we expand upon the direction taken by earlier work of Abecker et al. (1997) with respect to the importance of the object-meta relationship and the use of meta-knowledge to manage (or rather to complete) an OM. We suggest that the focus of the meta-knowledge in an email application, should be on the roles, perspectives, and characteristics of the people in an organization rather than on knowledge description. This, we argue, will effectively insure that knowledge will not be disassociated from the people and the situation (Sierhuis and Clancey 1997). We present the HyperMail architecture and sample application to illustrate how formal meta-knowledge is used to re-associate informal email communications to an Organizational Memory.