EMMOs - enhanced multimedia meta objects for re- purposing of knowledge assets

Abstract. There exist a broad variety of concepts and tools for supporting knowledge workers during the various phases of their work. However, structures created with one tool — e.g. a mindmap editor capturing a discussion process — usually cannot be re-used by other tools or in other contexts. The reasons are manifold, ranging from variations in syntactic expressions to semantic heterogeneity. In this paper we argue that there is a need for capturing and representing explicitly the structures not only between multimedia objects but also between the various stages in a development process. We outline a document model which we envisage to store these relationships and we name that model “EMMO — Enhanced Multimedia Meta Object”. EMMOs are enhanced by explicit knowledge structures, and they are first-class, i.e., they can be exchanged, traded and re-used in different contexts.