Sustaining Grass-roots Organizational Memories: Methods and Effects of Applying Managed Forgetting in Administrative Corporate Scenarios

将“遗忘”引入到组织知识管理方法和实践中，有望帮助克服信息过载，并轻松地关注和重新发现真正重要的事情。基于第一阶段的结果，在本项目中，我们将进一步研究管理遗忘的概念及其在企业环境中应用的适当框架。“有管理的”遗忘——一种基于证据的、不需要有意识意志的有意识遗忘——旨在将认知机制，尤其是遗忘的聚焦能力转化为数字世界，同时补充人类的记忆和遗忘。这是通过自动收集各种证据来预测信息项目的重要性，并将推断的信息价值——“记忆浮力”——与一套灵活的遗忘行为相结合来实现的。管理遗忘概念的进一步发展需要对其基础和效果、实施的智能方法以及将其嵌入知识管理和企业流程进行全面的跨学科研究。为了实现这些目标，来自三个不同领域的专家——认知科学、信息分析和检索以及知识管理——将在这个项目中密切合作。认知科学实验将加深对相关认知过程的理解，并研究在组织记忆中运用认知原则的效果。考虑到不同的时间框架和资源之间的关系，我们将开发多方面的信息价值评估方法，这有助于理解当前项目的重要性。学习记忆浮力将用于开发先进的“健忘”的基层组织记忆的信息访问方法，以满足行政知识工作过程的需要。最后，我们将研究对用户的影响，包括实证测试，在真实的公司背景下的验证，并调查人类和数字遗忘之间的相互作用。评估和实验将在项目中发挥至关重要的作用。因此，语义桌面为我们的跨学科研究提供了一个理想的结晶点：(a)它支持知识工作者的典型活动，例如在管理中；(b)它已经通过个人本体将人类认知系统的概念组织映射到基层组织记忆系统中；(c)它为技术、认知和跨学科研究和实验提供了一个测试平台。基于项目第一期“Arbeitsfeld 1”和“Arbeitsfeld 2”两个研究领域的成果，我们将在第二阶段进一步完善这些成果，同时重点关注“Arbeitsfeld 4”，即探索“Administration”应用领域的遗忘方法。

Introducing ‘forgetting’ into organizational knowledge management methods and practices promises to help overcoming information overload and to ease focusing on and refinding the really important things. Based on the results of the first phase, in this project, we will further investigate the concept of managed forgetting and its adequate framing, when applied in a corporate context. ‘Managed’ forgetting - an evidence-based routine of intentional forgetting that does not require conscious will - aims to translate cognitive mechanisms especially the focusing power of forgetting into the digital world, while at the same time complementing human remembering and forgetting. This is done by automatically collecting a variety of evidences for predicting the importance of information items and by combining the inferred information value - the ‘memory buoyancy’ - with a flexible set of forgetting actions. The further development of the concept Managed Forgetting requires comprehensive interdisciplinary research of its foundations and effects, of intelligent methods for its implementation as well as of its embedding into knowledge management and corporate processes. For achieving the objectives experts from three different domains – cognitive science, information analysis and retrieval and knowledge management – will closely work together in this project. Cognitive science experiments will deepen the understanding of relevant cognitive processes and investigate the effects of employing cognitive principles in organizational memories. Considering different temporal frames and the relationship between resources, we will develop multifaceted methods for information value assessment, which help in understanding the current item’s importance. The learned memory buoyancy will be used to develop advanced ‘forgetful’ information access methods for a grass-roots organizational memory, which meet the needs of administrative knowledge work processes. Finally, we will investigate the effects on the user, which incorporates empirical testing, validation in a real company context, and investigating the interactions between human and digital forgetting. Evaluation and experiments will play a crucial role in the project. Therefore, the Semantic Desktop is providing an ideal crystallization point for our interdisciplinary research: (a) It supports the typical activities of a knowledge worker, e.g. in administration; (b) it already maps the conceptual organization of the human cognitive system into a grass-roots organizational memory system via an personal ontology and (c) it provides a testbed for technical, cognitive and interdisciplinary research and experimentation. Based on the results for two research areas, namely ‘Arbeitsfeld 1’ and ‘Arbeitsfeld 2’ from the first phase of the project, we will further refine those results in the second phase, while focusing on ‘Arbeitsfeld 4’, i.e., exploring forgetful methods for the application area “Administration”.