On the issues of building Information Warehouses

TL;DR

This paper proposes the 'Information Warehouse' framework to enhance information management by capturing content along with context, supporting high-quality, authentic, and well-argued information retrieval for knowledge workers.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework for comprehensive information representation that includes content and context, addressing limitations of traditional document-centric approaches.

Findings

Framework supports high-quality information retrieval

Captures provenance and reasoning behind information

Enables efficient access to contextual information

Abstract

While performing knowledge-intensive tasks of professional nature, the knowledge workers need to access and process large volume of information. Apart from the quantity, they also require that the information received is of high quality in terms of authenticity and details. This, in turn, requires that the information delivered should also include argumentative support, exhibiting the reasoning process behind their development and provenance to indicate their lineage. In conventional document-centric practices for information management, such details are difficult to capture, represent/archive and retrieve/deliver. To achieve such capability we need to re-think some core issues of information management from the above requirements perspective. In this paper we develop a framework for comprehensive representation of information in archive, capturing informational contents along with their context. We shall call it the "Information Warehouse (IW)" framework of information archival. The IW is a significant yet technologically realizable conceptual advancement which can support efficiently some interesting classes of applications which can be very useful to the knowledge workers.