Knowledge ComposTer: A Platform for Reusing Unused Knowledge Fragments to Support Daily Document Creation

Creating documents using word processors and presentation tools is a common creative activity among knowledge workers. In this process, it is common for writers to reuse parts of materials that have been written in past documents to create new documents efficiently and effectively. We hypothesize that even knowledge fragments that were discarded during the creation process of past documents also have the potential to be reused, and we name such fragments “unused knowledge fragments (unused-KFs)” as opposed to “used knowledge fragments (used-KFs)” which were adopted in the outcome. We have developed the Knowledge ComposTer (KCT) platform to support users’ document creation by collecting and presenting unused-KFs to users during the creation process. We conducted an exploratory experiment to investigate whether the collected unused-KFs have the potential to be reused. The results indicated that: unused-KFs have the potential for reuse to some extent, and unused-KFs tend to be reused to generate new thoughts and ideas in an exploratory way rather than used-KFs.