Knowledge Management Environment Research Articles

Enabling the Knowledge Management Environment in SEE Countries through Harmonized Codification Using Information and Communication Technologies

Considering the importance of creation of Knowledge Management Environment in SEE countries, comparable with the EU Environment, trends and situation in EU countries,and the variety of available Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Solutions on the market, it is a difficult and challenging task of deciding what type of ICT solutions to use in support of creation of Knowledge Management Environmentin SEE. This paper aims to research the state of harmonized codification using the Information and Communication Technologies in SEE countries by investigating the role of ICT in creation of the successful Environment for Knowledge Management. Codification of Knowledgeusing information and communication technology (ICT) have made it easier to acquire, store, or disseminate knowledge than ever before, many organizations are employing IT to facilitate sharing and integration of knowledge. SEE countries are being advised that to remain competitive, they must efficiently and effectively create, locate, capture, and share their knowledge and expertise, and have the ability to bring that knowledge to bear on problems and opportunities. SEE countries are showing a serious interest in implementing knowledge management processes and technologies, and are even beginning to adopt knowledge management as part of their overall development strategy. With the codification approach, more explicit and structured knowledge is codified and stored in knowledge bases. Examples of such IT tools are knowledge expert directories and video-conferencing tools. Both these Knowledge Management approaches are fundamental to understanding the importance of ICT in creation of Environment for Knowledge Management. Positive samples will be useful to be implemented within SEE countries, and as an impact, the contribution of the paper will be shown as a possible model of managing and motivating an environment that supports Knowledge Management Environment in SEE countries, through harmonized codification using Information and Communication Technologies. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2014.v3n2p301

English

A study was undertaken to understand the contributions of indigenous knowledge in environmental management and to evaluate some useful plants in selected tribal villages of South and Southwest Cameroon. Intensive field trips were carried out and interviews were conducted with the indigenous people using questionnaires that addressed the use of each plant species for various purposes, local/traditional name of species, plant parts used methods of preparation, prescription and administration for medicinal uses. The work resulted in the documentation of fifty two species of ethnomedicinal plants belonging to thirty families. Among the documented plants, Asteraceae, Fabaceae, Acanthaceae, Euphorbiaceae, Apocynaceae, were the five dominant families with three or more species followed by Rubiaceae, Piperaceae, Lamiaceae, Poaceae, and Apiaceae with two species each. Plants used in traditional medicine are used as decoctions, infusions, macerations, powders, mixtures, squeezing, boiling, and direct eating. Thirty seven species used for varied purposes ranging from cultural, culinary, ecological, and architectural, were identified spreading over 22 families. Some of the species had some interesting uses such as plants as indicator species for rich soils, plants believed to solve boundary conflicts and witch craft, wrapping and preserving food among others. Traditions, customs, beliefs and cultural rights play an important role in environmental conservation and biodiversity of the South and South west regions of Cameroon. Hence, there is a need to utilize and vulgarize the ethnobotanical information, encourage the indigenous people as they contribute immensely in preserving the biodiversity.   Key words: Cameroon, environmental management, ethnobotany, indigenous knowledge, traditions, unconscious preservation.

The Promise of Solutions from Increasing Diversity in Ways of Knowing: Educational Lessons from Meteorology, Ethnobotany, and Systems Ecology

The number of terms used for historically unrepresented types of knowledge in environmental management is large and growing. The emphasis on these “new” perspectives reflects a shift in how society values different ways of knowing. A primary reason behind this recognition of value is that fresh perspectives offer new problem framings, approaches to solutions, and linkages to other issues. Successes in collaborating across multiple knowledge domains have yielded new medicines, culturally appropriate regulations, and a better understanding of ecological dynamics, among others. These examples show the search for creative solutions cuts across disciplines, each of which has its own priorities, values, ethical practices, and approaches to knowledge creation. This review demonstrates how systems ecology, ethnobotany, and meteorology increase problem solving by legitimizing different ways of knowing. Pioneers in valuing nonscientific ways of knowing, they set the path forward for methods and theory used to inform research questions.

Towards an Ontology-based Persona-driven Requirements and Knowledge Engineering

This paper presents the development of ontologies for OntoPersonaURM, an Ontology-Based Persona-Driven User Requirements Modeling model, with goal of providing insights into the construction of ontologies for explicit specifications of the concept of persona in representing users’ knowledge and characteristics, and the concepts of viewpoints, goals, scenarios, tasks, and requirements for Web application domain. OntoPersonaURM is composed of three interrelated ontologies: Persona Ontology, Behavioral-GST (Behavioral-Goal-Scenario-Task) Ontology, and Requirements Ontology. The objectives are to examine 1) how the concept of persona, in the context of the concepts of viewpoint, goal, scenario, task, and requirement, may be integrated in a unified environment and 2) how the concepts and their relationships may be specified ontologically. The explicit specifications of concepts and their relationships in the developed ontologies serve to establish a knowledge repository and foster common understanding of users’ needs and behaviors among developers and stakeholders during the requirements analysis and modeling activity. We provide a running example of a university course registration web application domain to demonstrate the OntoPersonaURM model, consisting of UML class diagrams and explicit specifications of the concepts of the ontologies in the Protégé-Frames ontology knowledge management environment.

Creating Meaningful Representations

Demanding business environments increasingly require knowledge work. Hereby, knowledge creation needs to rely on meaningful entities and representations, in particular for organisational change processes. In this paper, we report on exploring essential benefits for stakeholders and communities when applying major principles of Maria Montessori when articulating and communicating knowledge. Experienced benefits stem from stakeholders' self-determined and individualized design experiences. We motivate the embodiment of stakeholders into physically enriched and ambient knowledge management (KM) environments and reveal insights from testing those ideas. The results of our work should guide the development of enriched KM environments.

Studi E-Learning Berbasis Knowledge Management Lingkungan Hidup

National sustainable development needs to take into account the utilization of environmental natural resources for future generations. For the community, environment is a space or a place to stay for that need to be more preserved than utilized. Collaboration between knowledge of environment and preservation with ICT knowledge can be developed into a management system which is environmental knowledge management systems. Approach on the efficiency and effectiveness of ICT, which include variable timing, capacity, relevance,accessibility, flexibility, accuracy and reliability, can be used to explore the success determinants of communitybased environmental conservation as a central participant. Analysis method of this study uses the Core Processof KM consisting knowledge identification, knowledge aqcuition, knowledge development, knowledge sharing and distribution, knowledge utilization, and knowledge retention. Menawhile, the design method uses objectorientedbased approach (OOAD) that contains the UML diagrams, followed by evaluation and verification of test results of the e-learning application prototype which will be measured by IT Balanced Scorecard through four perspectives, namely: (1) government contribution; (2) society orientation, (3) excellent operation, (4)future orientation. With the formulation of the critical success factors is then developed a virtual learning model, in order to raise public awareness of the importance of environmental preservation. The result is a prototype model of environmental KMS application or e-learning which will be piloted in a few areas, especially in Jabodetabek.

Confronting Vision 20:2020 Challenges: The Place of Environmental Education in Universal Basic Science

Survival of living organisms on earth cannot be guaranteed without redressing the present devastating environment. Active involvement of all and sundry is highly necessary to manage the present intensive exploitative demands on the environmental resources by organisms. This was why a survey of the place of environmental education in Universal Basic Science for confronting vision 20:2020 challenges from the North central zone of Nigeria was examined in this paper. 536 students randomly selected from 10 Junior Secondary Schools in 4 randomly selected states from the zone participated. Two research hypotheses were tested through t-test analysis of Environmental Challenges Achievement Test (ECAT) scores. The results revealed that there were significant differences in students’ achievement on the inclusion of environmental concepts in the students’ knowledge of environmental management as well as the contributions of environmental education in resolving vision 20: 2020 environmental challenges. It was recommended among others that every child of school age should be involved in tree planting and cover cropping in all their localities every year; and the need for collaboration between government and farmers in a way that farmers would be helped directly to adopt new techniques and sustainable farming practices in addition to regulated grazing of animals. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n15p119

Conceptual Research Model of Factors that Influence Environmental Knowledge Management at Organizational Level

Accelerated development of humanity in recent decades generated a double effect as a result: (a) the development of economies, creating social welfare, on the one hand, and (b) a enormous pressure on the environment, causing pollution, on the other hand. Therefore the organizations need efficient management systems - which can be considered - to give them a plus on the competitive market; environmental management system with environmental knowledge management subsystem (EKMS) can be considered as the key to success of industrial organization. Low efficienty level of environmental knowledge management, operated by decisional agents (simple employee or manager in the position they hold) in the Romanian organizations (mainly the industrial organizations) is the main problem approached by this paper (MP). This paper intends to resolve the problem covered above (MP) designing a quality analysis model for environmental knowledge management and sinecvanon identifying the important factors that influence it (collecting data / information from: a. analysis of different documents (environmental documentation / job descriptions / organization and operation regulations) from the 10 industrial organizations of NE Region of Romania and beyond; b. analysis of the specialized literature (focusing on previous studies conducted)).

Confronting Vision 20:2020 Challenges: The Place of Environmental Education in Universal Basic Science

Survival of living organisms on earth cannot be guaranteed without redressing the present devastating environment. Active involvement of all and sundry is highly necessary to manage the present intensive exploitative demands on the environmental resources by organisms. This was why a survey of the place of environmental education in Universal Basic Science for confronting vision 20:2020 challenges from the North central zone of Nigeria was examined in this paper. 536 students randomly selected from 10 Junior Secondary Schools in 4 randomly selected states from the zone participated. Two research hypotheses were tested through t-test analysis of Environmental Challenges Achievement Test (ECAT) scores. The results revealed that there were significant differences in students’ achievement on the inclusion of environmental concepts in the students’ knowledge of environmental management as well as the contributions of environmental education in resolving vision 20: 2020 environmental challenges. It was recommended among others that every child of school age should be involved in tree planting and cover cropping in all their localities every year; and the need for collaboration between government and farmers in a way that farmers would be helped directly to adopt new techniques and sustainable farming practices in addition to regulated grazing of animals. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n6p27

Environmental Knowledge Management of Finnish Food and Drink Companies in Eco-Efficiency and Waste Management

Introduction Various tools for environmental management (EM) exist but few of them integrate the product life cycle perspective and the knowledge management (KM) approach. The life cycle perspective is an essential aspect of EM, since it classifies and describes actions related to all relevant environmental knowledge areas, from product acquisition, design and manufacture, to product service and disposal. On the other hand, use of KM to tackle environmental issues can help companies to better understand what can be done about environmental problems and how to realize the benefits of environmentally responsible actions (Frick, Kaiser, & Wilson, 2004). Most of the literature on environmental knowledge management (EKM) focuses on informational and softer decision-making tools rather than on appropriate understanding of specific environmental knowledge areas and their connection to organizational structure and culture (Heeney & Murphy, 1999). Environmental knowledge management should combine tools, mechanism, processes, structures, strategies, data, and information with people's experiences and ideas to enable the creation, capture, sharing, acquisition, and use of knowledge (Huang & Shih, 2009). Consequently, this research employs knowledge management and the product life cycle approach to address individual environmental knowledge areas about eco-efficiency and waste management and their interrelations. There are four relevant challenges for this study based on the literature. The first is incoherence between environmental knowledge about management of raw materials, energy efficiency, and waste (Kaiser & Fuhrer, 2003). Companies have knowledge gaps in understanding and utilization of product life cycle processes due to the complex relationship between raw materials, energy, and waste. The second challenge is related to an inability to identify and analyze all relevant environmental aspects and impacts within the areas of raw materials, energy, and waste management. Companies need to develop an atomistic approach for every business process in order to gain understanding about the risks, costs and benefits of their actions for the each knowledge area (Ipe, 2003; Kaiser & Fuhrer, 2003). The third challenge arises from a lack of empowerment of employees, which prevents them from taking relevant environmental actions. Boiral (2002) emphasizes that managers and environmental specialists must visit work sites and discuss with employees in order to identify their knowledge and competencies as well as to encourage them to think, share, and use their environmental knowledge. Companies also need to find solutions to integrate individual knowledge, plans, experience, and goals into organizational structures. The fourth challenge is found in external contacts and knowledge acquisition from stakeholders and suppliers. This challenge is related to the ability of organizations to acquire relevant external knowledge and integrate it appropriately into internal knowledge (Jorgensen, 2006, 2008). The general aim of this research is to analyze how companies identify relevant eco-efficiency and waste management aspects, their relations and causes, and how they act to address these aspects. Additionally, employing KM and the life cycle approach, this paper sets the following specific objectives: a) to analyze how companies acquire knowledge on eco-efficiency and waste management internally and externally; b) to analyze how companies share knowledge on eco-efficiency and waste management internally and externally; c) to outline the way in which companies use and create knowledge about eco-efficiency and waste management; d) to analyze knowledge accumulation and retrieval about eco-efficiency and waste management; This research focuses on the Finnish companies in food and drink sectors. The food and drink industry is the fourth biggest industry in Finland and, at the same time, one of the greatest users of materials and energy. …

Collaborative Environmental Knowledge Management

This article describes the integration of a smartphone, a world viewer and a geodatabase into a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) as a knowledge management platform for use in land management. A spatial interoperability mechanism was designed for integration of these various technologies distributed in different system layers and written in different programming languages. As users may vary in their education backgrounds and understanding of advanced information technologies, the proposed platform employs existing popular spatial technologies to facilitate usage. The platform includes an iPhone™ application, a web portal based on Google Earth™ viewer and a data server, all of which may be deployed in different and distant places, allowing remote collaboration. To evaluate the usability of the platform, a case study was implemented involving a scientist, a farmer and an agricultural consultant working collaboratively, but remotely, within the system to support their farming practices, decision-making and agricultural research. Users found that the efficiency of agricultural knowledge transfer was increased, and the centralized knowledge database would also be helpful for tracking farming history and supporting agricultural research. This represents a new paradigm in agricultural knowledge management, where relationships between the three key parties are bidirectional, in contrast to the traditional knowledge transfer pattern. This paradigm can be readily extended to other environmental management contexts.

Knowledge encapsulation framework for technosocial predictive modeling

Analysts who use predictive analytics methods need actionable evidence to support their models and simulations. Commonly, this evidence is distilled from large data sets with significant amount of culling and searching through a variety of sources including traditional and social media. The time/cost effectiveness and quality of the evidence marshaling process can be greatly enhanced by combining component technologies that support directed content harvesting, automated semantic annotation, and content analysis within a collaborative environment, with a functional interface to models and simulations. Existing evidence extraction tools provide some, but not all, the critical components that would empower such an integrated knowledge management environment. This paper describes a novel evidence marshaling solution that significantly advances the state of the art. Its embodiment, the Knowledge Encapsulation Framework (KEF), offers a suite of semi-automated and configurable content harvesting, vetting, annotation and analysis capabilities within a wiki-enabled and user-friendly visual interface that supports collaborative work across distributed teams of analysts. After a summarization of related work, our motivation, and the technical implementation of KEF, we will explore the model for using KEF and results of our research.

How Could Geomatics Promote Our Knowledge for Environmental Management in Eastern Algeria?

How Could Geomatics Promote Our Knowledge for Environmental Management in Eastern Algeria?

A new organisational memory for cross‐cultural knowledge management

PurposeEffectively managing the cultural environment is an important stepping stone towards international business success. Cultural problems, especially between partners coming from diametrically different cultural categories represent one of the key challenges of knowledge management in international business co‐operations. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of controversial cultural attitudes on collaboration and the use of most diverse knowledge capital of employees being regarded as a key resource for innovation and competitive advantage.Design/methodology/approachBased on a comprehensive literature review, the very extensive data collection phase, applying the case study method, was carried out over a 13 month period. It mainly consisted of in‐depth interviews requiring 23 of them to reach theoretical saturation, non‐participant and participant observation (seven), focus groups (four) and fieldtrip notes in two culturally diverse Russian and Austrian research settings. Theoretical sampling was used to select the participants. The grounded theory method of constant comparative analysis was used to analyze the gathered data.FindingsThe attitude towards sharing the precious resource of diverse employees' knowledge regarded as a prerequisite to international business success is influenced by national cultures. Protective attitudes for knowledge sharing limit the growth of humans' and the company's development. This paper suggests that providing the appropriate knowledge management tools and environment, especially referring to the soft aspects of emotions, will enhance and even change former institutionalised and ingrained patterns of behaviours. Therefore, the paper sheds light on the knowledge sharing contingency depending more on a social‐cognitive state rather than a static hierarchical status.Originality/valueThe paper poses two innovative organizational memory conceptualizations based on respondents' needs and demands entailing a synthesis of knowledge management and interpersonal interactions to achieve the highest level of efficiency and high degrees of knowledge sharing and absorption. It bridges the gap of purely knowledge based and unemotional management tools towards a lively and engaging tool. This would appear to be the first time that an investigation of this type has been conducted explaining culturally influenced factors of knowledge management in Eastern and Western European co‐operations.

Knowledge-based cost modelling of composite wing structures

The progressive industrialisation of composite-built aircraft is putting manufacturing engineers on a steep learning curve. An opportunity exists to use knowledge management tools to capture, share and reuse knowledge over multiple aircraft programs and maintain the constant flow of learning gained during aircraft program delivery. This article reports on research to develop a knowledge-based cost modelling capability for composite part concept evaluation. The approach integrates a knowledge management environment with a process-based cost estimation tool encoded in very large spreadsheets. To achieve this, the complexity of the cost model is managed by modularising it into simple, re-useable components. The knowledge management environment is then used to manage the knowledge life cycle, knowledge exploitation and knowledge visibility of those components. The result is a flexible cost modelling tool composed of traceable, verifiable and reliable knowledge elements that provides through-life knowledge support for cost engineering. Validation is achieved through functional application of the solution for composite wing top cover cost modelling.

Talkoot: software tool to create collaboratories for earth science

“Open science,” where researchers share and publish every element of their research process in addition to the final results, can foster novel ways of collaboration among researchers and has the potential to spontaneously create new virtual research collaborations. Based on scientific interest, these new virtual research collaborations can cut across traditional boundaries such as institutions and organizations. Advances in technology allow for software tools that can be used by different research groups and institutions to build and support virtual collaborations and infuse open science. This paper describes Talkoot, a software toolkit designed and developed by the authors to provide Earth Science researchers a ready-to-use knowledge management environment and an online platform for collaboration. Talkoot allows Earth Science researchers a means to systematically gather, tag and share their data, analysis workflows and research notes. These Talkoot features are designed to foster rapid knowledge sharing within a virtual community. Talkoot can be utilized by small to medium sized groups and research centers, as well as large enterprises such a national laboratories and federal agencies.

A Technology Architecture for Managing Explicit Knowledge Over the Entire Lifecycle of Large and Complex Projects

This is a three part presentation describing the development of a support engineering knowledge management system for the fleet of 10 ANZAC frigates engineered and constructed by Tenix Defence for the Australian and New Zealand Navies. Part 1 describes the nature of the knowledge that needs to be constructed and delivered for the ships to be safely operated and maintained, as well as some of the paradigmatic issues involved relating to the knowledge and document structures to be managed.Part 2 details the working environment and the business and systems architecture for authoring, managing and delivering knowledge to maintainers, and the specific systems implemented and how the architecture addresses the paradigmatic issues. Implementation of the system both dramatically increased the quality of the knowledge delivered and also dramatically reduced support engineering costs: 8,000 ship-specific maintenance procedures for 4 ships were reduced to 2,000 class-set of ‘SGML records’ for 10 ships; 5 people completely reworked 2,000 routines in around 3,000 person/hours; routines delivered for Ship 5 CUT 80%; subsequent content deliveries CUT 95%; keyboard time to incorporate one engineering change CUT more than 50%; cycle time to complete an engineering change CUT from up to a year to days.Part 3 explores how the system can be extended to other aspects of the lifecycle to form a complete fleet lifecycle knowledge management environment.

Understanding Knowledge Representation in the Knowledge Management Environment: Evaluation of Ontology Visualization Methods

Understanding Knowledge Representation in the Knowledge Management Environment: Evaluation of Ontology Visualization Methods

Semantic Turkey: A browser-integrated environment for knowledge acquisition and management

Semantic Turkey: A browser-integrated environment for knowledge acquisition and management

MANAGING CONCERN KNOWLEDGE IN SOFTWARE SYSTEMS

Knowledge representation, acquisition, and sharing in software development projects is challenging due to the involvement of different kinds of stakeholders and large heterogeneous repositories of artifacts. In this paper, we argue that the concept of a concern can be used to facilitate the management of knowledge concerning the various system artifacts. Concerns represent pieces of knowledge pertaining to various viewpoints and interests of the stakeholders. In order to represent concerns, we propose the use of a non-intrusive role-based mechanism called a fragment. Using this mechanism, tacit knowledge can be made explicit by mapping stakeholders interests to artifact repositories, concern-based queries can be addressed to the repositories, and concerns can be combined to produce new knowledge. A concern-based prototype tool environment for knowledge management has been built and used for evaluating the approach in the context of industrial case studies.