Supporting on-line resource discovery in the context of ongoing tasks with proactive software assistants

We present ongoing work on systems aimed at improving a user's awareness of resources available to them on the Internet and in intranets. First, we briefly describe Watson, a system that proactively retrieves documents from on-line repositories that are potentially useful in the context of a task, allowing the user to quickly become aware of document resources available in on-line information repositories. Next, we describe 121, an extension of Watson that builds communities of practice on the fly, based on the work that its users do, so that users with similar goals and interests can discover each other and communicate both synchronously and asynchronously. Both Watson and 121 operate given some knowledge of the user's current task, gleaned automatically from the behavior of users in software tools. As a result, the systems can provide users with useful resources in the context of the work that they are performing. We argue that the systems can foster a greater sense of awareness of the resources available, while minimizing the effort required to discover them. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd.