Enhancements of Meeting Information Management and Application for Knowledge Access and Learning Activities

Communication processes have become increasingly important in modern working life. Organizations invest a surprisingly high amount of financial resources and employee work time in both face-to-face and virtual meetings, yet this investment often produces poor results. To overcome this problem, research on technology-based support over a meeting’s life-cycle has been increasingly conducted in recent decades. As a result of this research, particular interest has emerged in meeting information systems, which may include technology-enhanced meeting rooms as well as tools for multi-modal meeting recording, automatic meeting information extraction and annotation, in-meeting support, meeting information archiving, indexing, retrieval and visualization. Despite this great interest in and research activity on meeting information systems, insufficient focus has been paid into flexible architectures, interchangeability of meeting information as well as the integration into business processes and applications. This situation has motivated our research consortium to direct the research activity within the MISTRAL project towards a flexible and extendable system that can be easily integrated into daily working environments for knowledge access and learning activities. In this paper, we give an overview about electronic meeting systems, introduce related work on meeting information systems, outline the MISTRAL concept and its implementation, and based on that we discuss findings and problems with our research.