The purpose of knowledge mapping is a better orientation in a given domain and accessing knowledge of the right people at the right time. Collaboration between students and academics is desired and knowing each other’s work or research objectives can signi cantly improve it. Our focus is to improve collaboration at University of Hradec Kralove by collaborative knowledge mapping. University’s knowl-edge mapping can be based on individual’s research objectives as well as sharing related documents. We propose a conceptual model for a platform that would allow students and academics to work with a complex set of relationships structured according to the Topic Map standard.
In this paper we describe the Multimedia Documentation Lab (MDL1), a system which is capable of processing vast amounts of data typically gathered from open sources in instructured form and in diverse formats. A sequence of processing steps analyzing the audio, video and textual content of the input is carried out. The resulting output is made available for search and retrieval, analysis and visualization on a next generation media server. The system can serve as a search platform across open, closed or secured networks. MDL can be used as a tool for situational awareness, information sharing or risk assessment, allowing the integration of multimedia content into the analysis process of security relevant affairs.
Although most enterprises nowadays increasingly employ digital informa-tion management in all areas, there are still many organisations – e.g. in the Public Sector – where much of formal and informal information is documented on paper only. This work lays out the concept of a set of digital metaphors for entities in the “paper world” and argues that they will ease the adoption and acceptance of digital informa-tion and knowledge management solutions.
We furthermore describe how the metaphors are linked with each other. We place a special focus on the relationship between informal, unstructured information and formally structured one, as well as on collaboration and knowledge sharing enabled by the metaphors. These aspects have been combined into a prototype that is described and illustrated in some detail
Ontology evaluation is an integral part of the ontology development process. Errors in ontology create serious problems for the information system based on it. To our surprise, the existing systems are unable to identify most of the errors. We evaluate some well known ontologies against the published error taxonomy and describe our algorithms to evaluate ontologies. The target errors include circulatory errors in class and property hierarchy, common class and property in disjoint decomposition, redundancy of sub class and sub property, redundancy of disjoint relation and disjoint knowledge omission. For the implementation, ontologies are indexed using a variant of already proposed and published scheme Ontrel. In addition to the previous errors taxonomy, the algorithms also cover recently extended error taxonomy. We evaluate our algorithms for performance and report errors detected in well known ontologies including Gene Ontology (GO), WordNet Ontology, OntoSem Ontology.
30.000 advisory calls per year! How to analyze, rate and improve them interactively? For getting these goals a novel technique is introduced, which is based on a structure similar to a music score. Via a “duet”, guided by the advisor called, the main contents of the dialogue are extracted and stored automatically. At this, trained speech recognition is applied for the (known) advisor’s part for monitoring and controlling the call’s course, and keyword spotting is used for the (unknown) “customer” to pick out instances from sets of expected values. The results thereof fill an abstract score annotated to the call conducted. Then, because of the strong structure of such scores, the archive of all these dialogues is an ideal base for retrieval, exploration, comparison and clustering of calls, using e.g. graphical tools like knowCube®.
2D barcodes are capable of storing different kind of data. A significant number of new mobile phones come with a built-in camera. These technologies together with the fact that mobile phones are next to the owner most of the time are the foundation of a variety of interesting applications. In Japan more than 75% of all mobile phones do have already a preinstalled barcode reader, that allows the user to decode the incorporated information of a barcode. This procedure can be used to improve the user experience while simplifying the input of data into the mobile device. These 2D barcodes can be used to exchange information
between mobile phones and to connect to the mobile web. These days the Western World is gaining interest in this technology. In this paper the most important applications are introduced. The relevance to print media and the advertising industry is shown.
There are many technologies calling themselves knowledge management systems in the market but most of them deal only with information management. The main difference between them is that knowledge management systems are oriented into people and participated in tacit knowledge capturing. The paper describes set of information technologies which could take part in all process of knowledge management and especially in collecting tacit knowledge.
This paper suggests a powerful yet so far not used way to assist knowledge workers: while they are working on a problem, a system in the background is continuously checking to determine if similar or helpful material has not been published before, elsewhere. The technique described aims to reduce effort and time required to search relevant data on the World Wide Web by moving from a “pull” paradigm, where the user has to become active, to a “push” paradigm, where the user is notified if something relevant is found. We claim that the approach facilitates work by providing context aware passive web search, result analysis, extraction and organization of information according to the tasks at hand. Instead of conventional information retrieval enhancements we suggest a model where relevant information automatically moves into the attention field of the knowledge worker.
This article deals with a special type of ePortfolio, the Learning and Personal Development Planning Portfolio (PDP). It explores the technical challenges deriving from pedagogical requirements of PDP processes and discusses how semantic web technologies can contribute to an integrated “ePortfolio-PDP System”.
Today, reuse-oriented software engineering covers the process of the development and evolution of software systems by reusing existing experience (i.e., products, processes, and knowledge). One of the major problems of software reuse is the lack of knowledge and skills for understanding reusable experience. This paper explains how the reuse process can be used to support individual learning on the one hand, and how learning can improve the selection of reuse experience and their application on the other hand. The paper emphasizes the importance
of context in the domain of reuse and how context information can be used to compose socalled Learning Spaces from Learning Components. Learning Spaces didactically enrich reusable experience and enhance experiential learning. The approach uses Wikis as a base technology for presenting and structuring learning content.
Organizational procurement is a process of information exchanges and price bargaining between buyer and seller. The process and its outcome are both influenced by the professional experience of the relevant agents, the cognition of the agents concerning market risk, the analysis of contingency in the bargaining process, etc. Decisions of an enterprise are composed by the individuals in the company. How to congregate and motivate the individuals to make good decisions for running the business in a company, are challenging issues today. A consulting model for the evolution of an organizational market is built, based on literature review of inter-organizational negotiations, and in-depth interviews with top-level executives in a few leading Taiwanese companies engaged in organizational procurement. An experimental study is conducted based on the proposed model, and the empirical data is collected to gain knowledge of organizational procurement decision making. TOVE and Protégé are applied in designing the ontology for creating valuable information for marketplace administrators building appropriate strategies for their businesses.
Formats and Technologies in the Digital Mathematics Library Project
The main obstacle to easy accessing the vast amount of knowledge is the fact that they are not available in well-designed, standard, fully indexed electronic form, together with detailed metadata and full-text search capabilities. This paper is a case study of design issues in a subproject of WDML (World Digital Mathematics Library) aimed at digitizing valuable mathematical journals and books published in the Czech and Slovak Republics, to make them publicly available in digital form. We discuss here the design of the work-flow aiming at having mathematical knowledge stored in digital library. The key concept is a gradual enhancement of the digital material by ‘knowledge enhancing’ filters applied to the markup-rich XML data.
The ELA-LogNet is an educational network of persons and institutions involved in logistics education and training and interested in supporting it by use of multimedia and information technologies. It focuses on enabling logistics educators and trainers to introduce any kinds of educational multimedia and technologies to their educational processes as knowledgeable consumers or well acquainted supervisors or even to become enthusiastic multimedia developers. For this, not only an appropriate technological infrastructure is required, but also an organizational basis and culture encouraging collaboration and exchange to the benefit of all of the network’s members. The paper will discuss these aspects on the basis of experience gained within the ELA-LogNet to help educational networks to encourage knowledge sharing and overcome knowledge hiding despite competitive situations.
In text-based information retrieval, which is the predominant retrieval task at present, several document models have been proposed, such as boolean, probabilistic, or (extended) vector models [Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto 1999]. Interestingly, the suffix tree document model is usually not discussed in the literature on the subject though it comes along with a property that sets it apart from the other models: It encodes information about word order. The suffix tree document model owes much of its popularity from the Vivísimo search engine, which operationalizes on-the-fly categorization of Internet search results. While the classical document models can be considered as vectors of words, the suffix tree document model as well as the related similarity measures are graph-based. Both types of document models provide an efficient means to compute document similarities, and, according to various publications, both types of document models work well in practice. However, there is no comparison between both paradigms that explains the concepts of one in terms of the other, or that contrasts their advantages and disadvantages with respect to certain retrieval tasks. In this paper we start to tackle this gap by shading light on the following questions: (1) How does similarity computation work in the suffix tree document model? (2) Based on the insights of Question 1, is it possible to combine concepts of both document model types within classification or categorization tasks? (3) Which of the document model types is more powerful with respect to unsupervised document classification?
This paper introduces a particular form of fuzzy-fingerprints—their construction, their interpretation, and their use in the field of information retrieval. Though the concept of fingerprinting in general is not new, the way of using them within a similarity search as described here is: Instead of computing the similarity between two fingerprints in order to access the similarity between the associated objects, simply the event of a fingerprint collision is used for a similarity assessment. The main impact of this approach is the small number of comparisons necessary to conduct a similarity search.
In this paper we introduce AdELE, a framework for adaptive e-learning utilising both eye tracking and content tracking technology. The framework is based upon the combination of fine-grained real-time eye tracking with synchronous content tracking, a user profiler, an adaptive multimedia learning environment, and a dynamic background library. The framework ensures not only adaptivity to the users’ preferences, knowledge level and the realtime tracking of their behaviour, but also ensures the relevance, accuracy and reliability of the knowledge provided.
Knowledge-based organizations such as universities have realized that effective development and management of their organizational knowledge base is critical to survival in today’s competitive business environment. The knowledge and expertise of a university’ staff who teach and research in different areas is the major asset that a university holds. In order to make use of this asset, there is a need to share expertise between staff as well as transfer expertise to industry. The need to be able to quickly locate experts with the specific expertise has been recognized by many universities. Traditional approach is to build an expertise database. However this approach heavily depends on individual expert and has problems in maintaining the up-to-date information. In this paper we discuss the development of an RDFbased Expertise Matcher suitable for use within an academic research environment. A key feature of this work is that the expertise profile is created based on the integration of multiple expertise indications stored in an organizational memory. In addition our approach combines the advantage of flexibility of keyword search and accuracy of concept search. An evaluation of the RDF-based Expertise Matcher has been conducted through an experiment and the key results are presented.
This paper is on topic identification, i. e., the construction of useful labels for sets of documents. Topic identification is essential in connection within categorizing search applications, where several sets of documents are delivered and an expressive description for each category must be constructed on the fly. The contributions of this paper are threefold. (1) It presents a framework to formally specify the topic identification problem along with its desired properties, (2) it introduces a classification scheme for topic identification algorithms and outlines the respective algorithm of the AIsearch meta search engine, (3) it proposes a hybrid approach to topic identification, which relies on classification knowledge of existing ontologies.
A small collection of metadata concepts has been jointly negotiated among a group of specialists to be relevant for classifying data used in their field. A series of comparisons are made to test levels of agreement between individuals when these concepts are used to tag data items. Inter-coder agreement measures are presented for a range of data sets and individuals with varying relationships to the data sets. The implications of the results for the use of metadata as a supporting mechanism for knowledge sharing are discussed.
In this paper we present the results of two studies aimed at understanding how employees find knowledge available in their organisation. Data about knowledge awareness and knowledge finding strategies were collected in two research organisations using interviews and on-line questionnaires. The results of the two studies demonstrate interesting patterns. First, we found that although people say that they are aware of knowledge in their organisation, they also indicate that the same knowledge is developed at different places in their organisations. Second, asking others and searching own mailbox and other own digital and paper archives – and not organisation-wide repositories – are most popular ways for finding in-house knowledge. The results are discussed in terms of implications from the perspective of employees and from the perspective of organisations.
Algorithmic research is an established knowledge engineering process that has allowed researchers to identify new or significant problems, to better understand existing approaches and experimental results, and to obtain new, effective and efficient solutions. While algorithmic researchers regularly contribute to this knowledge base by proposing new problems and novel solutions, the processes currently used to share this knowledge are inefficient, resulting in unproductive overhead. Most of these publication-centred processes lack explicit high-level knowledge structures to support efficient knowledge management. The authors describe a problem-centred collaborative knowledge management architecture associated with Computational Problem Solving (CPS). Specifically we articulate the structure and flow of such knowledge by making in-depth analysis of the needs of algorithmic researchers, and then extract the ontology. We also propose a knowledge flow measurement methodology to provide human-centred evaluations of research activities within the knowledge structure. This measurement enables us to highlight active research topics and to identify influential researchers. The collaborative knowledge management architecture was realized by implementing an Open Computational Problem Solving (OpenCPS) Knowledge Portal, which is an open-source project accessible at http://www.opencps.org.
The present state of research on competence management does not provide any suitable model that can be used in practice. This article presents a model for integrated competence management, which gives approaches from both cognitive science and organizational science a practical framework of action.
This paper describes a GeoLibrary as metaphor-based information and navigation space to access geodata archives. Books, shelves and further library metaphors are used to present geo datasets. Additionally, a map is used to provide a familiar environment for spatial visualizations and navigation. From the technical point of view, GeoCrystal as innovative information visualization technique is embedded into a 3D information and navigation room of the GeoLibrary to access geo datasets and geodata archives. GeoCrystal provides visualizations not only of search results, but is also useful for query formulation and query modification. Concerning semantic aspects, the structure of the GeoLibrary represents relationships among datasets and geodata archives. This structure is dynamically in the sense of user interests and individual objectives to access the wide range of information spectra of geodata disciplines respectively the individual way to dive into a semantic network for geodata. The paper is structured into three parts: Initially, chapter one and two introduce into the research topic of user guidance to geodata archives and provide a technical state-of-the art analysis within this context. Chapter three describes concepts and methods of the GeoLibrary and GeoCrystal. Finally, chapter four summarizes the most important results and discusses possible technical extensions as well as adoptions to other application fields.
Knowledge Flow Management is our newly proposed knowledge sharing and knowledge management approach, which can realize the tightly coupled and efficient knowledge sharing by optimizing the knowledge flow process. Incorporating the knowledge flow with the loosely coupled knowledge-sharing paradigms is a solution to balance the efficiency and flexibility. This paper first presents the concepts and methods of the Knowledge Flow and the Knowledge Grid and then presents the approach to incorporate them. The case of applying the approach to realize knowledge management in distributed software development team is studied.
This article introduces the EC-project PROMOTEQ (1ST-1999-11658) [PRO99]. [Kar0O], [TeI0l] where an overall framework for process-oriented knowledge management, starting by modelling knowledge intensive business processes in a web-environment and focusing on the knowledge management processes such as identification, validation, distribution usage and evaluation of knowledge is being developed. The conceptual ideas are briefly mentioned, examples of knowledge models are depicted and the realisation within a test scenario to enhance the quality of a software development process is briefly discussed.
ln this paper, we address the problem of integrating answering queries using views (and more generally query folding) with semantic query optimization into one optimizer that uses the semantic knowledge about information sources expressed as integrity constraints to support the query processing and optimization of knowledge management applications.
Establishing electronically accessible repositories of people’s capabilities, experiences, and key knowledge areas is key in setting up Enterprise Knowledge Management. A skills repository can be used for e.g. finding people, staffing, skills gap analysis, and professional development. The ontology based skills management system developed at Swiss Life uses RDF schema for storing ontologies. Its query interface is based on a combined RQL and HTML query engine.
This paper reports on long-term research work of recycling networks in Germany and Austria from a knowledge-based perspective. Using data from expert interviews, we
discuss the key determinants of inter-organizational knowledge transfer within networks. In particular, we highlight the factor of mutual trust as important determinant of knowledge transfer in company recycling networks. One important goal of our empirical research is the institutionalization of knowledge transfer through the implementation of a central recycling agency in order to build core capabilities and to create intellectual capital.
Software quality management and quality assurance are disciplines that require substantial knowledge of the methods and techniques to be applied. More important than a solid knowledge of methodology, however, is the ability to judge feasibility of approaches, and to tailor activities to the business unit culture and constraints. Software quality activities must be carefully integrated into an existing company or business culture. Making informed decisions requires more than knowledge – it calls for experience of what works and what does not work in a given environment. Experienced quality agents are a scarce resource. Exploiting a scarce resource – like experiences in software quality – more effectively is a straight-forward concept.
Five years ago, DaimlerChrysler set up a large research project with business units, called SEC (Software Experience Center). Its purpose was to explore opportunities for learning from experiences within and across different business units. Unlike more general approaches of knowledge management, SEC was entirely devoted to software processes: software
development, software acquisition, and in particular software quality in both development and acquisition settings.
However, not all expectations that are often related to experience exploitation are realistic. In SEC, some of our initial expectations were met, others were not. This talk reports and reflects on our attempts to capture, engineer, and reuse experiences in the realm of software quality and software process improvement.
This case study illustrates the knowledge management framework that was designed during the introduction of knowledge management instruments at Siemens Business Services GmbH & Co. or SBS, as it is known. The knowledge management framework will give the reader an understanding of the holistic approach to knowledge management and the different stages of implementation. It also introduces the key learning processes experienced by Siemens Business Services (SBS) during the various implementation phases. The knowledge management (KM) requirements, challenges and solutions within the service business are highlighted. The case study also shows the challenges and objectives of knowledge management (KM) programs, in general, and at Siemens Business Services (SBS), in particular. Based on the experience of the implementation of KM at SBS, the case study closes with critical success factors for other KM implementations, both within and outside Siemens.
In order to be able to (re-)use digital content, interested users must be able to identify and locate relevant documents. This requires descriptive data, nowadays generally referred to as metadata. Technical standards for a scaleable deployment on a global scale are required if we want to achieve a critical mass of resources. In this paper, we present the current status of ongoing work in this area, with a particular emphasis on the IEEE LTSC Learning Object Metadata standard [IEEE, 2001] and related developments in the context of the ISSS Learning Technologies Workshop [ISSS, 2001].
The efficient management of knowledge has become imperative for almost all types of organizations. Many approaches exist for dealing with knowledge management at a corporate level. But there is also a need to support knowledge management also at an individual level, a level which takes the specific needs, experiences and skills of knowledge workers into account. While largely unexplored within the field of knowledge management, in the field of digital libraries advanced personalization and customization concepts exist. Within this context, this paper examines these concepts and how they can be exploited to address the challenges which are typical for knowledge management. As the paper will show, many synergies exist, if knowledge management at an individual level is dealt with in combination with personal digital libraries.
The utilization of new emerging standards such as MPEG-7 is expected to be a major breakthrough for content-based multimedia data retrieval. The main features of the MPEG standards series and of related standards, formats and protocols are presented. It is discussed, how they, despite their partially early and immature stage, can best be utilized to yield effective results in the context of a knowledge management environment. Complementary to that, the current status and state of the art in content-based retrieval for images, video and audio content is briefly presented. In the context of the KNOW-Center we are developing a prototype platform to implement a user friendly and highly informative access to audiovisual content as a potential component for a future knowledge management system. The technical requirements and the system architecture for the prototype platform are described.
This paper deals with a general approach to knowledge management in companies and organizations. It strongly builds on insights concerning knowledge processing in superorganisms and reflects years of FAW experiences in applications. The paper in particular shows how (1) human resources, (2) issues of organization and (3) new IT systems interact in achieving a higher level of competence and competitiveness. In this context, dealing with non-explicit sources of knowledge is a major issue, too.
Knowledge management systems provide three basic services: information capture, storage and organization, and access. This paper argues that collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) provide features that make them uniquely suited as an integral part of information capture. After introducing CVEs, we present our work in this area and outline our future plans.