Europe is in transition to a knowledge economy. Effective knowledge management is fundamental to successful economic activity, yet enterprises find it hard to transform much of their essential knowledge into transferable, easily accessible, and actionable knowledge assets. Such hidden knowledge is typically held by individual knowledge workers, being either tacit (unarticulated) or explicit but not widely available (e.g. emails, personal desktop files).

ACTIVE aims to increase the productivity of knowledge workers in a pro-active, contextualised, yet easy and unobtrusive way. The aim is to convert tacit and unshared knowledge - the "hidden intelligence" of enterprises - into transferable, interoperable and actionable knowledge to support seamless collaboration and to enable problem solving. A key aspect will be support for informal procedural knowledge - the informal collaboration and problem-solving tasks that drive much knowledge work in the enterprise.

ACTIVE will integrate concepts, methods and tools from the fields of (i) Social Software and Web 2.0, (ii) Semantic Technologies, (iii) Context Mining, Context Modelling, and Context Sensitive Task Management, and (iv) Knowledge Process Mining, Knowledge Process Modelling and Pro-Active Knowledge Process Support into highly innovative application systems. The development will be accompanied by an analysis of key economic and organizational factors and incentive mechanisms, and strongly user-centric system development and evaluation.

The key result of ACTIVE will be a breakthrough which empowers enterprises to make knowledge technology effective for a much larger share of their essential knowledge.

ACTIVE will generate sustainable impact by deploying the tools and applications in three industry sectors: consulting, telecommunication and engineering ("ACTIVE technology"). The added value of ACTIVE technology will be evaluated in economic, organizational, and user studies, which conclude with rigorous field tests. A major focus of ACTIVE will be uptake by industry beyond the immediate consortium.

A critical mass of semantically annotated Web pages or multimedia repositories, as well as business-relevant, widely-accepted ontologies would provide a feasible basis for the development of real-world semantic applications, for the adoption of this technology at industrial level, and, why not, for the realization of the Semantic Web vision.

It is therefore understandable that the question of how to create semantic content effectively and efficiently has been investigated in several areas related to semantic technologies, ranging from ontology engineering, ontology learning and ontology population, to the semantic annotation of text, media and Web services resources. The result is a maturing inventory of techniques and tools which primarily aim at a complete (or at least partial) automation of the semantic content generation and management tasks, as a means to lower costs and improve productivity. Whilst the quality of such (fully) automated approaches has constantly improved, it is still far from outweighing the manual effort savings achieved, especially when it comes to the creation of meta-data for non-textual sources or the development of a widely accepted ontology, tasks which are human-driven through their very nature.

The declared aim of this project is to bridge the gap between human and computational intelligence in current semantic content authoring R&D landscape and to produce methodologies, methods and tools optimally exploiting and combining the two to enable the massive creation and feasible management of semantic contents in an economically based manner, and consequently, to provide the missing building block towards the world wide uptake of semantic technologies. Besides automated ways of semantic content creation, the participation of users who actively contribute to the semantic annotation is the main purpose of the proposed R&D project. For the attraction and motivation of users to engage and cooperate in this process, concepts of community have proven to be a critical success factor.