1. A method of operating a computer as a predictive information discovery engine in an operating environment, the operating environment including execution of one or more applications with which a user interacts to accomplish a task, comprising: receiving trigger signals from trigger components in the operating environment, the trigger components monitoring the user's interaction with the application and responding to predetermined user actions to generate the trigger signals each including signal-specific metadata, the signal-specific metadata obtained from a store of metadata including current context information about the user's use of the application; and automatically responding to the trigger signals to (i) query external data sources for information relevant to a current operating context of the user and applications as reflected in the signal-specific metadata from the trigger signals, and (ii) for information returned in response to the querying, present the returned information to the user in the current operating context to enable the user to use the presented information in connection with the task, wherein automatically responding to the trigger signals includes, in response to one trigger signal, both (i) querying one of the external data sources and receiving returned information in response to the querying, and (ii) presenting the returned information to the user in the current operating context to enable the user to use the presented information in connection with the task, and wherein the returned information is presented asynchronously with respect to a sequence of operations being performed by the user, and wherein the metadata are organized into use-case metadata and information metadata, the use-case metadata describing (i) the current operating context for the user, (ii) an association of the user with other users, and (iii) dependencies for an official procedure, project plan, or policy, the information metadata describing the information returned from the external data sources and being used to manage the external access for efficient operation.