Milk

Goals

The goal of MILK is to define an integrated and comprehensive knowledge management environment, which supports people working in a number of different situations in the best possible way. Thus, the future MILK environment will support users who are located in different places within or outside their offices; while travelling; while working at home alone or with others in open spaces, during coffee breaks (a priviledged moment which can give raise to many interesting activities) or in other informal meetings. Furthermore, the project works to develop related approaches and methodologies in knowledge management and to implement these within organisations, and to measure their value on business processes and to the organisations as a whole. Finally, as an important side-effect of our work, we aim to build and maintain a knowledge management "best in class" network of European academic institutions and public and private companies to share tools and practices.

MILK stands for multimedia interaction for learning and knowing.

Applications

MILK is an environment where added value functionalities are combined with basic document management features. Document management therefore plays a central role, but with a particular focus on understanding and exploring the relevance and value of documents, in relation to users and their current activities. Community-based collaborative filtering of documents is an important enabler for this in the project, for which we use the Knowledge Pump from XRCE.

We develop three user environments in MILK:

• a desktop environment, to be used by individuals when working at their desk;
• a mobile envrionment, to be used in mobile situations when travelling or in "foreign" office environmnets;
• a social environment, to be used by groups of people in different social situations, for example in meetings, at the coffee break, or in semi-public places such as a library or in the print room.

About the project

The MILK project is partly funded by the European Commission as part of the IST programme of their 5th Framework programme. MILK partners are: Irso, Butera e Partners, DA Research, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Orbiteam Software, picturesafe, University of Milan Bicocca, Xerox Research Center Europe, Xerox Global Services.

For further contact about the project, please contact Antonietta Grasso