Never before in history data has been generated and collected in such high volumes as it is today. Keeping up to date with the flood of data, using standard tools for data analysis and exploration, is fraught with difficulty. Visual analytics seeks to provide people with better and more effective ways to understand and analyze large datasets, while also enabling them to act upon their findings immediately. The field integrates the analytic capabilities of the computer and the abilities of the human analyst, allowing novel discoveries and empowering individuals to take control of the analytical process. In this paper we present the challenges of visual analytics and exemplify them with a couple of application examples that illustrate the existing potential of current visual analysis techniques but also their limitations.
Our objective is to support reasoning tasks in heritage architecture with graphics enabling analysts to visualise and share their understanding of how, from a given set of information, alternative scenarios or evolution can be inferred. The paper comments on the nature of the cognitive processes in historical sciences, and on factors that need to be weighed when interpreting sets of information. Visual solutions are proposed, and illustrated on real cases in Kraków Poland. They help spotting where alternative explanations should be considered in order to avoid unjustified assumptions and certitudes on the evolution of artefacts. The contribution expects to demonstrate that reasoning on uncertainties in historical sciences can be fruitfully backed up by concepts and practices from the infovis community.
Although inverse problems are well studied in engineering, physics and computer graphics this uncommon perspective has been less investigated in many other contexts where it also offers some potential interest. Basically an inverse problem (or inverse modeling) aims to find the parameter values of a model that can have produced a given result. This paper adopts this point of view in order to invert queries. Therefore the main objective becomes to find the query criteria that might have produced a known result set. In order to structure the field of investigation, a list of various inverse queries is proposed. Out of the five identified categories, the paper focuses on the simplest one: the inverse Boolean conjunctive queries composed of n criteria each involving one attribute taking orderable values. Some theoretical issues raised by this type of inverse query are discussed in detail. Next, the paper describes a solution to integrate such inverse queries in user interfaces. Finally a prototype implementing one of the possible solutions to materialize inverse queries is presented.
Assignment of sta to work tasks is a complex problem that involves a large number of factors and requires a lot of expertise. Long term as well as short term requirements need to be met which demands flexible solutions. Software tools can aid planners in reaching optimal dispatching plans but currently available solutions provide only incomplete support. This paper describes the design, development, and evaluation of a prototype for semi-automated assignment planning called A-Plan. We have carried out this work in the context of a gas device maintenance provider. In A-Plan, assignments of service technicians to customers are displayed visually and can be modi ed by direct manipulation. Smooth cooperative work is possible and an optimization algorithm has been integrated that facilitates semi-automatic planning. A qualitative evaluation with potential users and IT professionals provided encouraging feedback on the proposed integration of automated methods and interactive visual interfaces.
In this paper a software prototype called BrainDump is described. The approach is focusing on information gathering during web browsing sessions. While performing such a task, the structure and amount of needed data is not known in advance. The system provides the functionality to create and manipulate visual images of mental connections in a dynamic way. Therefore only one single step of interaction is needed. Furthermore the user can follow links back to the source of information, annotate content and hierarchically group collected items.
Interactive video is increasingly becoming a more and more dominant feature of our media platforms. Especially due to the popular YouTube annotations framework, integrating graphical annotations in a video has become very fashionable these days. However, the current options are limited to a few graphical shapes for which the user can define as good as no dynamic behaviour. Despite the enormous demand for easy-creatable, interactive video there are no such advanced tools available.
In this article we describe an innovative approach, to realize dynamics and interactivity of video annotations. First we explain basic concepts of video-markup like the generic element model and visual descriptors. After that we introduce the event-tree model, which can be used to define event-handling in an interactive video formally as well as visually. By combining these basic concepts, we can give an effective tool to the video community for realizing interactive and dynamic video in a simple, intuitive and focused way.
knowCube®, a novel multi criteria decision making tool, is introduced. Its user-friendly interface assists “intuitive surfing through decision spaces” by means which are also familiar to non-experts. Causes and effects of alternatives may be examined from different points of view, and several types of criteria – like quantitative or qualitative, dependent or independent, hard or soft, and all mixed together – can be handled at the same time. The tool’s broad applicability is illustrated by some application examples from absolutely different fields: Mixed Sandwiches of various materials are investigated in manufacturing, ideal Foams are produced due to optimal parameter settings, and personalized Drugs could be designed by balancing conflicting effects.
The user experience of any software or website consists of elements from the conceptual to the concrete level. These elements of user experience assist in the design and development of user interfaces. On the other hand, Ontologies provide a framework for computable representation of user interface elements and underlying data. This paper discusses strategies of introducing ontologies at different user interface layers adapted from user experience elements. These layers range from abstract levels (e.g. User needs/Application Objectives) to concrete levels (e.g. Application User Interface) in term of data representation. The proposed ontological framework enables device independent, semi-automated GUI construction which we will demonstrate at a personal information management example.
The detection of redundant or reused passages in texts is an important basis for various tasks including tracking of information flow, plagiarism detection, origin detection, web search and information retrieval. Being able to track the evolution of a piece of information through different revisions or instances of documents can generally help to gain an impression of the document’s background. In this paper we propose an efficient algorithm for detection of textual overlap between documents as well as a tool for its visualisation, created in the course of the Holinshed Project at the University of Oxford. The Evaluation on an annotated corpus shows that the proposed algorithm performs better than state of the art approaches.
We present iMapping, a diagrammatic zooming and nesting based approach for visually structuring information objects on the desktop with a special focus on personal knowledge management. It was designed based on a set of requirements gathered from the analysis of existing knowledge mapping techniques from a cognitive science point of view. We also briefly introduce a prototypical implementation.
There are plenty of projects aimed at incorporating semantic information into present day document processing. The main problem is their real-world usability. E-learning is one of the areas which can take advantage of the semantically described documents. In this paper we would like to introduce a framework of cooperating tools which can help extract, store, visualize semantics in this area.
We introduce a framework for a new idea tool Note, which gathers, fosters and manages innovative ideas. Note supports the development of organizational memory and is connected to the practices of organizational innovativeness. The tool utilizes text mining methods in idea processing, management and visualization and is thus a new approach in idea management software. The tool is under development.
Based on an analysis of existing tools and approaches and literature from the areas of design and cognitive science, we identify a set of functional requirements to be met by diagrammatic knowledge mapping techniques and tools in order to be cognitively adequate for extensive personal knowledge management. This collection of requirements can be used to evaluate existing tools or as a guideline for the design of novel knowledge mapping approaches and tools.
With the emerging trend ofWeb 3.0 and the resulting huge amount of usergenerated semantically-enriched data, improved ways of knowledge visualization and human computer interaction are needed. We present several techniques of visualizing particularly spatial knowledge in largely scalable, clear structured ontology trees on the web. In addition, we describe the representation of search results with a combined approach consisting of Ajax-based grids and Google Maps.
Recently, the information community has seen the emergence of user-centric media applications, which are characterized by the central position given to the user. To fulfill the user-centric promise, it is necessary to understand and model the actions of the users of the system. This position paper presents a methodology for modeling the behavior of multimedia database users. To this end, we propose to analyze the query logs to derive the classes of behaviors of a user. The presented method bases on the characteristics of user queries and on taxonomies. The behaviors are established using a query classification algorithm.
A mining method for egocentric and polycentric queries in multi-dimensional networks is proposed. The method allows fast search for objects in sufficient proximity of other object(s) where the proximity is defined in terms of multiple relationships between objects. The method uses spreading activation technique. Other potential uses of spreading activation technique are also outlined and, in particular, include applications to collaborative filtering (community detection based on tag recommendations, expertise location, etc). Moreover, the spreading activation technique is combined with so-called ambient navigation. The advantages of such approach are high performance and high scalability in terms of size of multidimensional network. The proposed method is very practical and is implemented in IBM LanguageWare software products.
When studying heritage artefacts, and trying to represent what we know of them, it is important to portray not only key moments in their evolution, but also processes of transformation. In this contribution, we introduce a methodological framework of description of architectural changes, and investigate diagrammatic representations as means to visualize the above mentioned framework. We introduce two types of diagrams (diachrograms that distribute along a time axis transitions and states, variograms that detail the nature of the changes) that should help better understanding, how changes over time affect architecture. The paper also underlines key aspects of data in “historical sciences”: uncertainties, incompleteness, long ranges of time, unevenly distributed physical and temporal stratifications.
Companies are faced with managing as well as integrating large collections of distributed data today. Here, the challenging task is not to store these volumes of structured and interlinked data but to understand and analyze its explicit or implicit relationships. However, up to date there is virtually no support in navigating, visualizing or even analyzing structured data sets of this size appropriately. This paper describes novel rendering techniques enabling a new level of visual analytics combined with interactive exploration principles. The underlying visualization rationale is driven by the principle of providing detail information with respect to qualitative as well as quantitative aspects on user demand while offering an overview at any time. By means of our prototypical implementation and a real-world data set we show how to answer several data specific tasks by interactive visual exploration.
In the economic and financial analysis domain a quick access to the right information plays a major role. Using current systems, the search for and presentation of data is very cumbersome. The data, mostly in form of time-series, is stored in various databases. In order to retrieve the searched data, the analysts need to know where to search and sometimes even the structure of the database and its coding. Then it is required to export the data, process the data and create a chart to view the data. This might take time from tens of minutes to hours.
In our work we present a first prototype of an integrated search engine that takes as input a natural language query and offers graphic and text output depending on the user task. The system automatically identifies the time-series answers, types of graphical data presentation and shows the results in a web browser and in Excel. The knowledge-based expert system uses domain ontologies for extraction of economic terms in the search queries and specially built data type taxonomy with user task and chart type ontologies for identification of graphic output.
An increasing amount of valuable information is stored in RDF. In order to let humans access this information, providing an appropriate visualization of RDF data is an important challenge. In this paper, we present a new approach, combining list and a graph visualization to counterbalance the respective disadvantages of both representation paradigms to better handle the complexity of both the size and the
structure of RDF data.
In this paper an approach is presented how self-regulated learning can be supported and stimulated by visualising knowledge and competence structures in order to provide visual guidance in the learning process. In the field of adaptive systems and related research techniques of intelligent guidance have been developed, which, however, may have the disadvantage of limiting the learner. On the other hand, self-regulated learning gives greater control and responsibility to the learner, however, especially weak learner may have difficulties without provision of guidance. The presented approach combines both offering guidance and granting control over the own learning process. A set of learning tools have been developed which implement and demonstrate the proposed approach. Since knowledge structuring and knowledge visualisation are well established in the field of knowledge management, this approach can be exploited to bridge the research fields of e-learning and knowledge
management.
In today’s information environments, tagging is widely used to provide informationabout arbitrary types of digital resources. This information is created by end users with different motivations and for different kinds of purposes. When aiming to support users in the tagging process, these differences play an important role. This paper discusses several approaches to generate tag recommendations, and a prototypical recommender system for the social resource sharing platform ALOE will be presented.
This interactive system allows users to control the generation of the recommendations by selecting the sources to be used as well as their impact. The component was introduced at DFKI, and a first evaluation showed that the recommender component was considered as helpful by a majority of users.
The Web 2.0 philosophy has brought new ways of using the web as a content repository and a sharing platform. Non-computer skilled people can now publish their own text, images, videos and/or sounds and take part in communities created around topics they like. It has also brought an opportunity to propose resources to a potentially huge audience. Indeed, a promotional video posted on YouTube can be watched by millions of users. That is why we wanted to know if it was possible to take advantage of this possibility to recruit testers for our music learning tool: our development is user centred, so it is important for us to have it evaluated by lots of testers. Until now, they were recruited in a geographically limited area, i.e Réunion Island. Therefore, we have set up an experiment called “E-guitar Sonar Edition” to gather information about this recruiting opportunity. The idea is thus to design a free downloadable version of our system (originally, it was a DVD), put it on a dedicated web site and have it promoted thanks to video sequences posted on YouTube and Dailymotion, the two majors video Web 2.0 sharing sites, the most appropriate services. This article presents the conditions and the process used. It also deals with the assessment part, the way we gather feedback and finally shows the firsts results. The experiment itself has no limit in time, so it is still currently running.
Providing context-aware personalized desktop assistance that is related to the work task of the knowledge worker is a recent research topic. Our approach focuses on task detection by work context observation. A sum of steps towards this goal are addressed by our work, including (1) accessing the desktop computers event stream of user interaction and system status, (2) context reasoning and prediction of the user’s working task and (3) recommending relevant resources based on the predicted work goal. Here, we present an algorithmic approach for automated context aggregation by using mapping functions. This instance of context inference combines lower-level context features to new aggregated features which represent a higher-level context. While related work uses manually defined domain-specific rules for combining features, we automate this approach and in addition show that by means of that the prediction accuracy of the user’s work task increases significantly.
Manual quality control of audiovisual content in the different steps of the media production, delivery and archiving process causes significant costs. Semi-automatic quality control requires automatisation of quality analysis, quality metadata interoperability and efficient visualisation tools. In this paper we propose the use of MPEG-7 for standard compliant description of media quality metadata and a quality summary visualisation tool which facilitates efficient exploration of visually impaired content by the user.
This paper introduces a new model of personalized usage of the internet that is based on technologies of user representation, artificial intelligence and semantic augmentation of the content. By taking advantage of internet’s unprecedented dynamics, compared to traditional media, this user representation model incorporates cognitive, mainly, psychology theories, combined with parameters that constitute more traditional approaches in user profiling (such as demographics, expertise, etc). The purpose of this research is to alleviate difficulties that massive approaches impose on areas such as education and information processing, by integrating intelligent adaptive characteristics into web applications; this can lead to a highly adapted to each user’s needs content and more effective, in our case, learning.
New media applications like E-Learning or Computer supported collaborative learning are becoming more and more popular and the internet plays a key role in this development. These applications open up new ways in education, which were not thinkable only some years ago. Nowadays the progress in technology like broadband internet access, video on demand, streaming media, etc. allow to realize such applications. But as first approaches show, to realize a good E-Learning application is not only a matter of technology it is also a matter of good interface and system design. Often a good interface/system design, which puts the user and his needs into the focus, is as important for a successful application as the realized functionality.
This papers presents a study investigating the learner perspective on the use of learning management systems by conducting focus groups. Based on the statements we derived requirements and propose design improvements in order to support and facilitate collaborative learning applications.
The Web 2.0 philosophy has brought new ways of using the web as a content repository and a sharing platform. Non-computer skilled people can now publish their own text, images, videos and/or sounds and take part in communities created around topics they like. Our idea is thus to use this new communication mechanism to assist skill learning. Skill is indeed a difficult knowledge to learn on a text form as it is hard to describe movements, gestures or procedures in this way: sometime, a picture or a video is better than a thousand of words.
As a popular field of experience, we have focused our attention on music learning, and more particularly on guitar pieces learning. Music is very representative of skill learning, it is both a physical and an intellectual activity. The “Gloss2U” service we describe in this article takes into account the specificities of this learning process, especially as events are time-related.
To achieve this, we rely on new equipment conditions that are nowadays gathered. Userfriendly multimedia tools opened new horizons and broadband networks (ADSL, cable, …) are becoming more and more common. Almost everybody is a potential content producer with just a webcam or a cell phone. Our system is therefore audio and video based and users interact with each others by submitting contributions, called glosses, in the context of the piece they are learning. A dialogue starts between student users (learners) and experimented ones (professors), to discuss encountered problems and the way to solve them. The other strength of this system is that it can act as a knowledge repository for forthcoming practitioners.
Service oriented architectures (SOAs) are a new paradigm in IT-management. This paper presents an SOA-implementation in the intranet portal of a 520-employee research institute, which was launched to accompany parallel knowledge-management (KM) activities. Furthermore it explains the benefits of an SOA-based IT-landscape for KM-activities.
In this paper we describe novel ideas and their prototypical implementation for the visualization of rule bases. In the creation of the visualization our approach considers not only the structure of a rule base but also records of its usage. We also discuss methods to address the challenges for visualization tools posed by rule bases that are large, created with high level knowledge acquisition tools or that contain low level rules that should remain hidden from the users.
Analysing and understanding the evolution of historic artefacts requires the crossexamination of indications ranging from specific pieces of data (remains of the edifice, archival materials, etc.), to generic pieces of knowledge (historical context, comparable cases, theory of architecture, etc.). This research is based on the premise that the artefact’s acts as a media allowing the integration of the above-mentioned heterogeneous indications. Consequently, they may enable information visualisation and retrieval through 2D/3D dynamic graphics. In this contribution, we discuss four SVG-based graphic tools aiming at exploiting visually the relations between an artefact and the above-mentioned indications, i.e. its documentation.
This research aims at innovative IT support for competence management (CM) integrating organizational, group and individual perspectives. Our method is action case research resulting in a design model. This paper addresses our overall approach towards an integrative CM system, which is usage-oriented. Based on in-depth analysis of seven business companies’ CM activities, we present a new interactive visualization model for CM. The model is suitable for explorative analysis and for communicating competence situations at individual, group or organizational levels. It provides support for constructing competence information incrementally. We view competence descriptions as negotiable estimations with varying verification levels, and use a competence representation which deals with uncertainties of estimations. Our view on competence is novel, and has far reaching consequences. Future work includes a running prototype and planned pilot studies.
Self-Organising Maps are utilised in many data mining and knowledge management applications. Although various visualisations have been proposed for SOM, these techniques lack in distinguishing between the items mapped to the same unit. Here we present a novel technique for the visualisation of Self-Organising Maps that displays inputs not in the centre of the map units, but shifts them towards the closest neighbours, the degree of the movement depending on the similarity to the neighbours. The night-sky visualisation facilitates better understanding of the underlying data. We report results from applying our method on two synthetic and a real-life data set.
The visualization of temporal information should not be seen as a special case. A lot of applications take advantage of the time factor (e.g. capturing user events). In general recorded activities on a workstation can be seen as a temporal database and so can profit from a time-based visual output system too. We introduce a model which classifies the time as a ”first class citizen” in today’s operating systems. Such an invention would not only improve and standardize the capturing of temporal events but it would be of benefit for a temporal visualization system too. Within a 3D visualization space and a global time axis we introduce a printf4D() method. With this method it is possible to display images, videos, text strings or any other kinds of information in an automatically animated way. As a first proposal we demonstrate this function in a ”flow of information” metaphor where information-objects are not displayed all at once but in a flowing manner over a certain period of time. Additionally we will show that printf4D() is not limited to temporal data. It can be extended automatically to any kind of static information.
Explanations of modeling errors in ontologies are of crucial importance both when creating and maintaining the ontology. This work presents two novel incremental methods for error explanations in semantic web ontologies and shows that they have significantly better performance than the state of the art black-box techniques. Both promising techniques together with our implementation of a tableau reasoner for an important OWL-DL subset SHIN are used in our semantic annotation tool prototype to explain modeling errors.
Leading researchers in the fields of business strategy, organizational theory, institutional economics and economic development routinely emphasize the growth of the knowledge economy and by implication, there is a vital need for organizations to manage, share and leverage knowledge assets. Yet, it has been increasing clear from previous research that the field of knowledge management (KM) has not in general met its goals of transforming information sharing and collaborations in organisations. Lucier and Torsilera [97] claim that 84 percent of KM programs fail to have any real impact. Despite these problems, KM addresses a clearly perceived need for innovation, whether expressed in terms of the knowledge economy, knowledge workers, or intellectual capital management. This paper points to some gaps in the current body of knowledge about KM, and suggests areas of investigation that build on its strength. We propose a simple framework for what we term Knowledge Fusion to provide rigor and relevance to KM.
Straightforward expertise localization is crucial for personal and organizational efficiency and productivity. Common issues with existing approaches are the amount of effort required to build up the database and keeping it up-to-date, and the difficulty of establishing a complete coverage of the organization. The ExpertFinder system employs the concepts of referral chaining, social networks and user-generated data to enable a fast, low-effort and thereby low-cost approach to building an expertise localization database. At the same time, ExpertFinder provides a number of views on this database. We describe the design of the system and discuss in detail two pilots conducted at Océ-Technologies and the Telematica Instituut, the findings of which show high user participation and a good coverage of individual employee expertise and overall organizational expertise.
The paper starts with the wish list for a “perfect” information exploration tool, where the topics of that list are collected from the work of some pioneers and experts in this field, as e.g. from C. Ahlberg, C. Williamson and B. Shneiderman. After that, a novel multi criteria knowledge management technique is introduced, that comes fairly close to the wish list given. This will be demonstrated by looking on some general aspects of information exploration, and how knowCube, a user-friendly software tool supporting graphical decision making, masters such tasks, where user interaction happens via standard drawing tools, like pen, brush or text marker. The paper ends with an outlook on FilmFinder – Version knowCube.
The knowledge is defined as combination and organization of data and information in given context and Knowledge Management (KM) provides capturing, storing and reusing of knowledge objects. In Web 2.0 world the knowledge is represented in form of microcontent object and KM 2.0 proposes creation, sharing and leveraging the microknowledge in a collaborative way. The microknowledge in Web 2.0 network can be controlled through designing the instructional strategies that will provide user learning paths and activities and that will give possibilities for sharing of those same learning activities and microknowledge with others. The present paper is aimed to reflect of the research needs and the new challenges in the mentioned above three areas: KM, Web 2.0 technologies and Learning Design (LD). It is focused on designing of personalized learning using IMS LD elements. The paper analyzes the possibilities of applying Web 2.0 technologies for defining a broaden set of activities and creating the rich environments with microknowledge objects and web services in one successful scenario.
This paper discusses the requirements of a framework for sharing digital resources and metadata to meet the needs of open, flexible Knowledge Management solutions. The changing nature of the Web and its users as observed in recent years clearly establishes the need for new approaches and technologies to fully exploit the potential for working with existing digital resources. Formal metadata about the resources can be combined with information created in lightweight and user-centric approachesin order to significantly enhance resource descriptions and enable more efficient access to existing knowledge. The ALOE system, currently in development at DFKI, is one such solution and it is used here as the basis for a sample realization of an appropriate framework.
When facing partial evidence on how architectural objects evolved through time (often due to uncompleted information), it is important to provide the researcher with tools for a cross-examination of cases that may help him better delineate possible values for lacking information. In the case of architecture, we deal with data that can be attached to a given location (distribution in time and space) and to a given generic typology. This opens an opportunity to use pseudo cartographic representations in order to visually distribute objects that share a common typology. Unlike with geographical maps, we should however include visual signs that tell the user about the architectural composition of each object in the data set, as well as about its level of documentation. In this paper we try to demonstrate, using a data set concerning antique theatres, that visual comparative evaluations of the data can provide a major
methodological breakthrough for cross-examination of information on architectural objects.
Daily work with information spread across multiple data sources is still a time consuming task when it comes to managing, searching and securely distributing to dedicated recipients. The paper describes the generation of a homogeneous knowledge representation extracted from heterogeneous personal data sources. Used for unified navigation through personal knowledge it assists the user in retrieving any information even with limited devices such as smartphones through a single interface.
Information Realisation is the process of presenting data as Textual, Graphical or Audial information to a human user. In this paper, we discuss the importance of this concept with respect to the accessibility of Semantic Web data to a diverse target audience. We provide an ontological point of view, defining the expressive characteristics and application domain of representation formats, thus presenting a system which produces representations customised to the user environment and the nature of the source data. Our approach considers the semantics of the data, not just the structure, and aims to present the information in the most semantically appropriate manner for the given target environment. We provide examples of a simple data set being realised as popular target representation formats: textual (XHTML, RSS); graphical (SVG, X3D); and audial (SoundML, VoiceXML).
On the one hand models can be used as navigational tools respecting mental processing capabilities of persons. On the other hand models can be analyzed automatically by information systems to deduce relevant content for knowledge management IT-components as E-Learning-Applications, KM-Portals, document management systems, etc. Therefore models of knowledge intensive business processes are a natural integration layer for persons and information systems providing the relevant context to interpret and handle information the right way. It has only to be solved how to interface these models efficiently from a person as well as from an information system point of view.
Today, most computer users work with traditional hierarchical file systems for organizing large amounts of personal files. Recently, tagging has grown popular as
an alternative means of organizing information resources. We argue that tagging is a powerful paradigm for efficient information access which overcomes many deficiencies of hierarchical file systems, especially in the context of the organization of large quantities of personal files. In this paper we present TagFS, a filesystem with tagging support which aims at a seamless integration of the tagging paradigm with local applications. While retaining the notions of directories and files and providing all standard filesystem operations, the semantics of these primitives are changed to modifications of the tag annotations.
This paper describes an ontology supported software prototype that combines the advantages of existing Internet search engines with modern text analysis functionalities and an intelligent storage system for documents and knowledge items. The ontology assists the user in query definition and structures the storage of documents as well as knowledge items. The system is implemented and tested for the business case of SMEs that want to internationalise. It can easily be transferred to other domains just by changing the ontology.
The intranet portal of a company is often used as supporting tool for Knowledge Management (KM), e.g. in conjunction with yellow pages, knowledge maps, document storage systems and information retrieval. But although KM generally is considered to be important, it often does not get off the ground. One of the reasons is a lack of steady marketing. This paper points out the fundamental importance of the intranet entry page to permanently market internal KM-activities in order to make them part of the staff’s thinking and daily work by presenting results of a case study made in the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS.
This paper presents an applocation called Visual Browser that is able to visualize RDF data. It explains the advantage of the RDF/RDFS as well as the way RDF triples are displayed in the visualisation process. One of the most importand features of the programm comprises a two level visualization – the data and the so-called perspective of view. The scope of this architecture is shown on examples. Two very different domains are visualized: WordNet and a Universal information Robot’s knowldege base.
Investigating the evolution of patrimonial architecture requires gathering and analysing a mass of documentary sources, the interpretation of which may authorise researchers to produce graphical simulations of the morphological evolutions of edifices. We have demonstrated that such representations can be used as graphic interfaces in which architectural objects are located in time and space. However in the field of the architectural heritage, due to the lack or incompleteness of the documentation, at the beginning of an investigation objects are often known to researchers only by their toponimical reference: their contextual names. In the early phases of an investigation process, it is most often impossible to state with any reasonable accuracy what morphology an object had. Moreover, other clues to the understanding of the edifice and its evolution, such as terminology/ontology or analogies, can be gathered by the researchers before someone actually states what morphology the object could have. Aiming at improving the comprehension of the complex and discontinuous process of knowledge acquisition we introduce a generic formalism of information integration that lets the researchers to gather indications little by little, and allows them to follow up visually the knowledge acquisition process. This paper introduces the use of toponymy as a start point for the analysis of the edifice, and
describes the formalism we have developed in order to generalise this approach.
The successful and efficient querying of information in electronic information pools is becoming increasingly important in today’s information society. At the same time the quantity of existing information is continually growing. Querying scientific literature and selecting relevant hits are typical examples for this. [Börner and Chen 02] present possibilities to display structured information pools visually in order to simplify querying and selection processes. However, current interaction possibilities are limited to the manipulation of hit images (cutting out, zooming, rotating). The structure features of the underlying information pool remain unconsidered. Our JADE interface uses this structure information additionally to support the refinement task as well as the navigation within the space of query hits. It is based on mathematical procedures known as formal concept analysis. We carried out an evaluation study in order to determine the efficiency of the interactive visualisation techniques provided by JADE. Psychology students were made to perform various query tasks with a literature database. One group worked with a common web interface. The other group worked with JADE. The query results articulate a clear advantage for utilising interactive visualisation techniques in regard to the common parameters of query tasks, precision and recall.
Information management and IT are often called the backbone of an organisation. Yet in practice, IT does not play the most important role in managing information: That much can be learned from experience with ‚dead‘ (hardly ever used) knowledge bases. While there are many technical solutions to so called repositories or FAQ collections hardly any attention is paid to the problem of transfer: how stored, „sedimented“ know how from the knowledge bases can be transformed into professional knowledge empowering people to act competently. Neither practice nor knowledge management research is really concerned with this issue. Referring to discussions about organisational learning and organisational memory concepts, our case study deals with informal learning processes in specialised professional communication. The SEM®THEK case study will show a possible solution to the transfer problem: knowledge, collected and stored in knowledge bases, is processed to fit the needs of users by applying models of instruction which were originally developed in media didactics, technical documentation and transfer research.
This paper compares the effectiveness of the Project Tube Map and the Gantt Chart for inter-functional communication in large projects where different stakeholders are involved. Today, Gantt Charts are well known in project management. However, the use of Gantt Charts has limitations: It fails in motivational aspects, it has difficulties to illustrate who is collaborating with whom, and it badly supports recall. The Project Tube Map has been introduced earlier as an approach to overcome these limitations. This paper compares the effectiveness of both visualization methods. Our findings from the evaluation of 44 interviews indicate that the Project Tube Map is more effective for (1) drawing attention and keeping interest, (2) presenting overview and detail, (3) visualizing who is collaborating with whom, (4) motivating people to participate in the project, and (5) increasing recall. The findings indicate that both formats complement each other. We further present an algorithm that allows the automatic creation of Project Tube Maps. The results presented in this paper are important for researchers and practitioners in the fields of Knowledge Visualization, Project Management, Visual Communication Sciences, and Information Visualization.
In general, metainformation plays an important role in knowledge management for finding information. However, adding metainformation usually takes additional time. We work on WildDocs, a spatial-based knowledge management system. One of its main tasks is providing implicit metainformation that was added automatically during the structuring process without requiring a high cognitive load. This is supported by a detailed and less abstract structure model as well as by real world-based simulation of behavior. In this paper, we focus on emerging rotation, fixed sized documents, and binding mechanisms. We conclude that spatial structure techniques that consider physical limits and emerging structures may add important metainformation without significantly increased cognitive load on the user. We further point to our current and future implementation and the development of a special input device that supports efficient navigation on WildDocs’s space.
Contents of a website can be constructed by two means. Conventional websites usually have a sitemap initially. Using this map as a blueprint, the website designers develop the pages of the content and add links to the content of a website, such as the I-Know’05 homepage. For the website known as a knowledge portal, a sitemap cannot be prepared to outline the contents in advance. A knowledge portal site allows its members to create their own knowledge objects. The website therefore grows itself unlimitedly and unexpectedly just like a coral. Interestingly, these knowledge objects are not only represented in webpages but also associated with conceptual elements defined within the ontology of the knowledge portal. In this regard, we develop a visualization tool to display the sitemap of a knowledge portal and observe the concept map of group knowledge. As a practice platform of our visualization tool, we chose a locally developed knowledge portal, called Open Computational Problem Solving (OpenCPS) Knowledge Portal.
An integrated semantic dissemination system based on dynamic taxonomies is presented. The system supports conceptual information pull through an easily understood visual interface. A similar interface is used to express user interests at a conceptual level so that precise push strategies can be implemented. This system is currently used to manage the announcements coming from DBWorld, one of the best-known computer science research mailing lists, but it can be easily adapted to the dissemination needs of very diverse application areas ranging from e-government, to e-commerce, personalized news, etc.
A number of recent studies have contributed to Knowledge Management (KM) and E-learning integration. They are mainly based on organizational learning analysis. In this paper, KM is discussed from the viewpoint of adaptation in e-learning systems. The main components of adaptive e-learning system are discussed with respect to the KM processes. We analyze users and developers of adaptive e-learning systems and the knowledge, with which they operate. We present our view of knowledge and meta-knowledge concepts in the context of adaptive elearning systems. The role of meta-knowledge as a contextual knowledge is emphasized for adaptation in e-learning. The paper discusses the challenges of KM in adaptive e-learning systems and analyses the main KM processes that should be introduced in adaptive e-learning systems.
E-learning at the workplace might be accompanied by synchronous cooperative learning episodes of small groups using net-based communication. In a field study carried out in a large software company an interaction of factors determining the quality of such cooperative learning was observed. In this study, a software tool was used which supported a specific instructional design by phase-specific delivering of instructions and learning materials as well as by means of process control (including turn-taking, role assignment, and coordination of task flow). There was no tutor or instructor present in the learning sessions. The learning processes of six small groups were evaluated on the basis of a content analysis. Results demonstrate a high amount of topic-oriented contributions and the realization of the expected learning activities. It was concluded that the learning processes were successful because of the fine-grained implementation of the instructional design in the software tool. However, feedback data indicated a low acceptance of the software tool. Participants evaluated the process control as being restrictive. It was assumed that there was a non-optimal interaction between the factors technology and target group / context in the study.
This paper introduces and evaluates the effectiveness of a new visualization method that helps to communicate a complex business process in an organization. A quality development process needed to be established in an education centre for health care professions. Traditional project plans, flyers and mails did not manage to get the attention, present an overview and details and motivate the employees for action. Because visual metaphors are effective for knowledge communication, we developed a customized tube map visualization that illustrates the whole process: Each tube line represents a target group, each station a milestone. The visualization was printed as a poster and located at prominent locations in the organization. The evaluation showed that the tube map visualization is a powerful metaphor to communicate a complex project to different target groups and build up a mutual story. The employees considered it useful because it provides an overview and detailed information in one image and initiates discussions.
Recent trends in structure and content of global knowledge spaces present new challenges to the field of Knowledge Discovery. Very large, highly structured repositories are increasingly replacing smaller, flat information spaces. Such repositories are often filled with multimedia documents, including image, audio and video data. This publication briefly outlines the underlying trends and discusses implications on approaches to Knowledge Discovery. Some examples for applications accomodating these implications are presented and analysed for lessons learned which can be incorporated in designing future Knowledge Discovery systems. Emphasis is given to the visualisation of hierarchical structures and to cross-media knowledge mining, two fields crucial for adressing future challenges to Knowledge Discovery.
In this paper we describe a software tool which aims at supporting the interplay between autonomous management of local knowledge within communities and the sharing, negotiation and coordination of knowledge among different (heterogeneous) communities, in order to sustain perspective making and perspective taking leading to innovation. The developed system combines methods for constructing artefacts reflecting the patterns of language use in a community (LanguageMaps) through document clustering and creation of personalised concept networks, with interactive visualisation and with the Reconciler tool for explicit negotiation and alignment of meanings between disparate concepts into ontology-like structures.
In this paper, we propose a technological approach that allows communities to coexist with conflicts and leaves that agreed knowledge emerges naturally, by the simple act of sharing knowledge. On the top of a collaborative workspace for developing a shared knowledge repository, we put forward: a mechanism for maintaining the discussion threads, a knowledge awareness mechanism to be up-to-date about discussion threads and their evolution, and a user centred workspace to support personal view of the shared repository with the capability of adding private knowledge.
There is an increasing number of different ways to represent knowledge structures on computers. Additionally, people want to use different devices, applications, or media for the same knowledge structures. To support this, we investigate structure interoperability, including transformation of structures and combination of different structure types. Our work focuses on structuring tasks using paper as well as those using computers. Our overall goal is to improve the usage of computers as tools for structuring knowledge work.
This paper is based on on-going research carried out in the framework of an EU project aimed at enhancing knowledge management (KM) in enterprises. It deals with the impact of (inter)cultural factors on the accessibility and presentation of eLearning content. Once the empirical research is completed and the data analysed, guidelines will be proposed for developing Web-based training modules for culturally heterogeneous user groups sharing the same professional background. Special consideration will be given to contextual and community features.
Traditional software used for student-centered learning typically provides for a uniform user interface through which information is delivered in a uniformly identical fashion to all users without regard to their learning style. This research classifies personality types of computer science undergraduate students using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator; relates these types of personalities to defined learning preferences; and tests if a user interface designed for a student’s learning preference enhances learning. The approach of this study is as follows: given a set of user interfaces designed to fit personality types, provide a user interface to participants with the matching personality type. In the control group, provide participants with a randomly chosen user interface. Observe the performance of all participants in a post-test. Quantitative results indicate that personality-aware user interfaces have a significant effect on learning. Qualitative results show that in most cases, users preferred user interfaces designed for their own personality type.
Documentation analysis and organisation are vital to the researcher when trying to understand the evolution of patrimonial edifices and sites. Documentary sources provide partial evidences from which the researcher will infer possible scenarios on how an edifice may have changed throughout the centuries. Still, in the field of the architectural heritage, there is a gap to fill between proven data management technologies that provide solutions for documentation handling, and geometric modelling techniques that underlie reconstruction efforts. Documentation is organised with regards to what the documents are, books, illustrations, etc… Virtual renderings feature a geometry that bears no link to the documentation’s analysis. Our contribution introduces a solution for attaching the documentation to architectural concepts that represent physical beings used in the edifice’s structure, and this without modifications on existing documentation descriptions. 3D scenes can then be used as one of the means to access or visualise the information we hold on the edifice’s or site’s evolution.
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.
The widespread use of cellular devices has resulted in an increased demand for proper and continuous functioning of cellular services. For this reason, cellular service providers require better and more sophisticated tools to analyze customer usage data. They are constantly seeking new approaches for fine tuning and optimizing the performance of their networks. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a new space-filling visualization technique that is capable of displaying multi-dimensional attributes of a cellular network data. We illustrate the value of the technique through an example.
The visualisation of text corpora requires a spatialization process to map the underlying information structure onto a three-dimensional space. The information structure must be preserved from the original document corpus to the 3D representation for this spatialization to be useful. In this paper, we describe an experimental evaluation of spatialization algorithms and parameters for each step in the process.
This paper reports an ongoing longitudinal study of the adoption of information visualization systems by administrative data analysts. Participants were initially excited about the anticipated potential of visual data analysis for their work, but gradually discovered difficulties that eventually precluded a true integration of the visualization system into their daily work practices. These difficulties are unrelated to the specific visualization system used. We conclude that data analysts can take much better advantage of the benefits of information visualization systems when these systems are redesigned to be complementary products of current data analysis and workflow systems, rather than being stand-alone products as is currently the case. Our study offers some insights about how this complementarity can be
achieved.
This paper presents an approach to supporting the exchange of knowledge in communities of practice that connect experts from different fields of expertise. The developed system allows unobtrusive construction of personalised knowledge maps that capture implicit knowledge of individuals and groups of users and make it usable for collaborative structuring of shared information repositories. The personalised maps also reflect the global patterns of knowledge exchange in the community which allows the extraction of a shared conceptual structure that connects knowledge across different individuals and groups of users. To this end techniques for self-organised clustering are combined with methods for supervised learning and collaborative filtering. Application scenarios include automatic generation of personalised knowledge portals, collaborative knowledge management and the construction of shared ontologies and topic networks. The real-world testbed is the Internet platfom netzspannung.org.
This article outlines new technologies in the areas of automated expertise finding, expert network discover, virtual place-based collaboration, and automated question answering. We illustrate each of these areas with implemented and in some cases empirically evaluated systems. Collectively, these illustrate new methods for automatic discovery of knowledge, experts, and communities in an effective and efficient manner.
In IT-supported knowledge management (KM), the software user interface is at the boundary between persons and the knowledge management system (KMS). It plays a central role because seen from the users point of view, the user interface is the system. This paper presents a case study in which a particular User Interface Design methodology was employed to design a prototype KMS user interface for an inbound call center. In this example, we combine knowledge re-use and expert location.
This paper describes our vision for the near future in digital content analysis as it relates to the creation, verification, and presentation of knowledge. We focus on how visualization enables humans to make discoveries and gain knowledge. Visualization, in this context, is not just the picture representing the data but also a two-way interaction between humans and their information resources for the purposes of knowledge discovery, verification, and the sharing of knowledge with others. We present visual interaction and analysis examples to demonstrate how one current visualization tool analyzes large, diverse collections of text. This is followed by lessons learned and the presentation of a core concept for a new human information discourse.