Knowledge Management Community Research Articles

Co-designing a wiki-based community knowledge management system for personal science.

Personal science is the practice of addressing personally relevant health questions through self-research. Implementing personal science can be challenging, owing to the need to develop and adopt research protocols, tools and methods. While online communities can provide valuable peer support, tools for systematically accessing community knowledge are lacking. The objective of this study is to apply a participatory design process involving a community of personal science practitioners to develop a peer-produced knowledge base that supports the needs of practitioners as consumers and contributors of knowledge. The process led to the development of the Personal Science Wiki, an open repository for documenting and accessing individual self-tracking projects while facilitating the establishment of consensus knowledge. After initial design iterations and a field testing phase, we performed a user study with 21 participants to test and improve the platform, and to explore suitable information architectures. The study deepened our understanding of barriers to scaling the personal science community, established an infrastructure for knowledge management actively used by the community and provided lessons on challenges, information needs, representations and architectures to support individuals with their personal health inquiries.

Socialization of Community Knowledge Management about Pharmaceutical Products in Suka Damai Village, Langkat, North Sumatra

Socialization of public knowledge management about pharmaceutical products aims to provide information as a form of dissemination in the form of education. This community service was carried out in Suka Damai Village, Langkat district, North Sumatra Province. The purpose of this community service is to provide and practice knowledge about pharmaceutical products through traditional medicines which are mixed from plant ingredients, animal ingredients, mineral ingredients, galenic preparations, or mixtures of these materials. Traditional medicine can be made into a simple product that can be made and practiced by yourself, for example roll on aromatherapy or commonly called freshcare which has many uses in everyday life. Apart from that, other products such as dry instant ginger drinks can also be consumed with various benefits. The use of natural materials can also be used as a way to open business opportunities. Thus, people gain knowledge and know how to make one of the health products that so far when they want to use it they have to buy it first.

Exploring Communication Management and Public Relations in Two Emerging Markets, China and Thailand

This study aimed to address the lack of empirical research in public relations management by investigating the perspectives of professional leaders in public relations in two emerging markets, namely China and Thailand. To gather information, a pragmatic mixed-method approach, which included a survey and interviews, was employed. The data was then processed using SPSS using a sample size of 234. The study developed a framework based on the Meng and Berger Model on PR leaders. It explores how leadership in public relations is shaped by the sociopolitical context of the nation by examining and comparing the cases of China and Thailand. The study draws on the interpretation of professional leadership in public communication by PR leaders. The participants from both countries indicated that there were some similarities and differences between the Chinese and Thai markets concerning public relation leadership. With the most important issue raised in both countries, speed and volume of information appeared to be the most important. In addressing the issues, in-service training to gain new skills and taking advantage of the internet to acquire information appeared as the most important tools. Inspiring and motivating, and ability to manage teams appeared as important leadership abilities considered of value in both countries. The study identified three key dimensions that were present in both countries, namely team collaboration, communication knowledge management, and organizational culture and structure.

Online knowledge sharing in blockchains: towards increasing participation

PurposeThis paper aims to propose a system dynamics model of blockchain online community knowledge sharing, with the following goals: to reveal the internal mechanism of blockchain technology on community knowledge sharing; to show the impact of blockchain technology on knowledge sharing; and to promote knowledge sharing and the self-development of blockchain online communities.Design/methodology/approachBased on the core characteristic factors of blockchain technology, including incentive mechanism, trust mechanism, information protection mechanism, etc., a knowledge sharing analysis framework is established. Through the use of the Vensim PLE (Personal Learning Version) software, according to the steps of “putting forward a dynamic hypothesis”, “establishing a system dynamic equations”, and then “model testing” and “simulation”, the article analyzes in depth the process and extent of the impact of the above features on online community knowledge sharing.FindingsThe results show that the blockchain incentive mechanism, trust mechanism and information protection mechanism all contribute to promoting an increase in the number of community knowledge sharing users, as well as in the total amount of knowledge shared. The results also show that the token reward in the incentive mechanism has in fact a higher degree of influence than the trust and information protection mechanisms.Originality/valueAt present, no research on the internal mechanism of knowledge sharing in blockchain online communities has been carried out. This article plays a complementary role in research in this field, and offers significant guidance for promoting online community knowledge management and online community development.

The role of aesthetic reasoning in knowledge management: the case of elegant systems architecture design

ABSTRACTNonaka and Takeuchi foundational work brought tacit knowledge to the attention of the Knowledge Management (KM) community. During the same years, research in cognitive science was offering new insights on how tacit knowledge operates by highlighting the role of visual perception and aesthetic appreciation. Despite these developments, the relationship between tacit knowledge and aesthetics has received scarce attention in KM literature. Drawing from studies in Neuro-Aesthetics, Gestalt psychology, Art critique and Design, we focus on the relationship between aesthetics and ambiguity resolution and adopt as empirical unit engineering systems representations. We show that more effective system representations can be achieved through the application of a set of aesthetic principles supporting the achievement of an optimal level of complexity in the representation (effective complexity). The empirical findings provide evidence that more aesthetically pleasant system representations built following this approach leads to the design of both more elegant and performant systems.

Nomadic Knowledge Sharing Practices and Challenges: Findings From a Long-Term Case Study

In this paper, we explore a specialized type of knowledge, namely, nomadic knowledge, to understand its implications in knowledge sharing. Nomadic knowledge is enacted in a discontinuous pattern with a changing set of actors and further flows on a defined trajectory. This knowledge is quite important but is required sporadically, so it has a varying level of importance for stakeholders at different instances of time. The limited interest of knowledge holders after the creation of this type of knowledge makes its sharing process complex. Furthermore, new sets of actors overloaded with tasks often ignore the knowledge sharing aspect of nomadic knowledge due to the urgency of the tasks at hand. Using a long-term field study, we illustrate practices concerning the sharing of nomadic knowledge, which, we argue, are to date not yet well supported technologically. The objective of this contribution is, therefore, to outline the concept of nomadic knowledge and associated implications, so that respective knowledge sharing practices can be supported by the knowledge management community with appropriate technology. The underlying complexity of knowledge sharing practices highlighted in this paper stresses the need for appropriate technological and social processes to facilitate the sharing of nomadic knowledge.

Dealing with Direct and Indirect Ontology Alignment

Ontology alignment is grasping an increasing attention topic. Indeed, it is a palliating issue to the heterogeneity problem that arises among the semantic web data. In this respect, a steady effort within the knowledge management community, and ontology alignment in particular, is carried out to meet the thriving raised challenges. Indeed, it is of paramount importance to overcome the natural language barrier as well as the produced alignments reuse and exploitation. As far as the challenging cited issues are both intrinsically related to the basic alignment problem, our contribution aims to provide a framework encompassing two alignment systems. The first one is dedicated to direct cross-lingual ontology alignment. The second one treats the indirect ontology alignment issue. The underlying idea of our approach is that the linguistic heterogeneity and its after-effect are reduced thanks to well-defined techniques use and harmonization. Those techniques endow our methods with more efficiency and accuracy in the candidate mappings detection phase. In the same way, we introduce an alignment composition system in order to valorize existing ones by producing indirectly computed alignments. We evaluated our contribution in various tracks and obtained a high-quality encouraging results.

Case Based Reasoning for Green Information Systems Infusion and Assimilation among IT Professionals in University Campuses

Information Technology (IT) usage in university campuses consume enormous amount of power and incur other costs in cooling and related operations. Currently, universities are infusing environmental friendly initiatives in their campus. However, IT professionals in most universities are still not sure how to infuse and assimilate environmental friendly practices. Hence, Green Information Systems (IS) is suggested as the utilization of technologies and systems for a Greener and more sustainable planet. Accordingly, this study carried out a review on existing Green IS practices and further proposes a decision support framework based on Case Based Reasoning (CBR) technique. The proposed framework utilizes CBR to support the decision making of IT professionals in infusing and assimilating Green IS within university campuses. Findings from this study show how the framework utilizes CBR to support IT professionals in assimilating Green IS lifecycle and infusing Green IS determinants. Furthermore, findings from this study show how IT professionals can Green their university campuses. Moreover, this research study would also be of interest to data and knowledge management community as well as environmental scientists and sustainability researchers.

Knowledge management and business performance: global experts’ views on future research needs

Purpose This paper aims to examine the views of the global knowledge management (KM) community on the research area of KM and business performance and identify key future research themes. Design/methodology/approach An interview study spanning 222 informants in 38 countries was launched to collect data on KM expert views concerning the future research needs of the KM field. Findings The value contribution of KM requires more research despite experts agreeing on the complexities involved in solving this challenge. Further research areas identified were related to the influence of KM to support business strategy, intellectual capital, decision-making, knowledge sharing, organizational learning, innovation performance, productivity and competitive advantage. Research limitations/implications The sample is dominated by European-based KM experts and the self-selecting sampling approach that was used by relying on the networks of each partner could have biased the structure of this sample. Practical implications The recognition of the complexity to demonstrate the value contribution of KM could prevent practitioners from using over-simplified approaches and encourage them to use more advanced measurement approaches. Originality/value The paper is unique, in that it reports on the views of 222 KM experts from 38 countries representing both academia and practice, on the issue of future research needs in terms of KM and business outcomes. As such it provides valuable guidance for future studies in the KM field and related subjects.

From passenger to pilot – Taking the lead and building a business critical information management strategy

Deciding to make the move from practitioner or manager to strategist is a career changing move for many in the information and knowledge management community. It is both exciting and daunting and the challenges of developing and delivering a successful information management strategy are well documented. This article reflects on the author’s experience of making this move and shares learning points for those who are considering developing their own information management strategy. From starting out with small successes, building personal stock and credibility and creating an audience for your strategy, through researching user needs and understanding your stakeholders, the author offers real-life examples and shares insights to support your decision making. Suggestions are given for linking information strategy to your organisation’s mission, values and objectives and insights are shared on managing financial and human resources to ensure successful delivery of the strategy. Far from being a step by step guide on what to put in your strategy document, this article provides honest advice on what to expect from the process of strategy development and delivery and how you can set yourself up to succeed.

Prophetic blogger identification based on buzzword prediction ability

Purpose Identifying important users from social media has recently attracted much attention in the information and knowledge management community. Although researchers have focused on users’ knowledge levels on certain topics or influence degrees on other users in social networks, previous works have not studied users’ prediction ability on future popularity. This paper aims to propose a novel approach to find prophetic bloggers based on their buzzword prediction ability. Design/methodology/approach The main approach is to conduct a time-series analysis in the blogosphere considering four factors: post earliness, content similarity, entry frequency and buzzword coverage. Our method has four steps: categorizing a blogger into knowledgeable categories, identifying past buzzwords, analyzing a buzzword’s peak time content and growth period and, finally, evaluating a blogger’s prediction ability on a buzzword and on a category. Findings Experimental results on real-world blog data consisting of 150 million entries from 11 million bloggers demonstrate that the proposed approach can find prophetic bloggers and outperforms others that do not take temporal features into account. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, our approach is the first successful attempt to identify prophetic bloggers. Finding prophetic bloggers can bring great values for two reasons. First, as prophetic bloggers tend to post creative and insightful information, analysis on their blog entries may help find future buzzword candidates. Second, communication with prophetic bloggers can help understand future trends, gain insight into early adopters’ thoughts on new technology or even foresee things that will become popular.

Methodologies for Building a Knowledge Map: A Literature Survey

Nowadays one of the most important phenomenons in organizations is their ability to make the available knowledge internally visible in a formal way. Most organizations are facing difficulty in making important knowledge visible as part of their knowledge management effort. Knowledge maps make it easier to locate this knowledge, capture it and make it visible for the organization. Several methodologies have been proposed and presented for building a knowledge map. Despite this, discussion on those methodologies in the literature is very little. Thus, the goal of this study is to carry out a literature survey to determine all the existing methodologies used for building a knowledge map, then cross-referencing those methodologies with the five types of knowledge map. Practitioners and researchers involved with knowledge maps may find this study useful as it provides a wide description of those methodologies and assesses their degree of contrast. The fact that this study is the first literature survey of methodologies used to build knowledge maps makes it a significant contribution to the Knowledge Management (KM) community.

Enhancing Access to Knowledge Management Literature — A Proposal for Domain-Based Classification Scheme and Thesaurus

Knowledge organisation systems (KOS) include a variety of tools and methods for organising information and knowledge 'things'. When we refer to KOS we generally mean classification schemes, thesauri, semantic networks, and authority control systems. Most academic disciplines are supported by professionally developed and maintained KOS. This is not the case for knowledge management. Knowledge management is insufficiently treated in existing KOS. The research is exploratory in its approach to developing KOS tools for the field. It is engaging in that at every stage of development it leverages the knowledge and input of the larger knowledge management community.

Semantic network edges: a human-machine approach to represent typed relations in social networks

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a novel approach to the development and semantic enhancement of a social network to support the analysis and interpretation of digital oral history data from jazz archives and special collections. Design/methodology/approach – A multi-method approach was applied including automated named entity recognition and extraction to create a social network, and crowdsourcing techniques to semantically enhance the data through the classification of relations and the integration of contextual information. Linked open data standards provided the knowledge representation technique for the data set underlying the network. Findings – The study described here identifies the challenges and opportunities of a combination of a machine and a human-driven approach to the development of social networks from textual documents. The creation, visualization and enrichment of a social network are presented within a real-world scenario. The data set from which the network is based is accessible via an application programming interface and, thus, shareable with the knowledge management community for reuse and mash-ups. Originality/value – This paper presents original methods to address the issue of detecting and representing semantic relationships from text. Another element of novelty is in that it applies semantic web technologies to the construction and enhancement of the network and underlying data set, making the data readable across platforms and linkable with external data sets. This approach has the potential to make social networks dynamic and open to integration with external data sources.

Sanal Uygulama Topluluğu Üyelerinin Bilgi Paylaşma Davranışlarının İncelenmesi

Knowledge sharing is seen as one of the most vital processes for knowledge management and virtual communities of practice (VCoPs). In this study, knowledge sharing behaviors between members of VCoPs and opinions about their community were investigated. We employed a qualitative research design. Data were gathered on the members through online observation of the messages in the VCoPs. Additional data were collected via semi-structured individual interviews. The results of the survey showed that the majority of the activity was Sharing Knowledge, followed by Talk/Conversation and Request. The most common type of knowledge shared was Sharing Resource. Results also showed that there was a significant difference between gender, time to become a member, means of communication used, types of knowledge and activities. Our results showed that people are more likely to participate in such communities because of “tangible returns”. The findings revealed that sharer members appear to be main motivator. On the other hand, disrupted issues were seen a major barrier.

Industrial challenges in managing product development knowledge

To systematically create and share product development knowledge creates challenges for engineering companies. This paper presents an extensive study regarding the process of identifying such challenges in managing product development knowledge from the perspective of designers and engineers. This research is part of the LeanPPD, a project funded by the EU-PF7 (www.leanppd.eu), to address the need of European manufacturing companies for a new model, which extends beyond lean manufacturing and incorporates lean thinking into the product design and development process. A rigorous research methodology has been employed, which included the use of questionnaires and focused interviews with key informants from industry, involving forty-two product development engineers from nine different companies. The most significant concerns raised during the study concerned knowledge life cycle activities, product development environment and management. Thirty-eight challenges were identified, classified and discussed in order to provide the knowledge management community with practical evidence, and also to inform future research directions in managing product development knowledge.

An Externalizable Model of Tactical Mission Control for Knowledge Transfer

Organizations that deal with humanitarian assistance, disaster response and military activities are often exposed to dynamic environments where chaos rules. Under these circumstances, standard operating procedures may not be always be applicable, forcing the controllers to resort to opportunistic, or even scrambled, control. The lack of tactical or strategic control forces the teams to rely on experience from scenario-based training and prior missions. Acquiring, and retaining, such experience is thus essential to prepare for future events. Based on ideas from the knowledge management community, this article proposes an externalizable control model, supporting methods for retaining mission experience through internalization via hypermedia. Such a knowledge base of experience can be used to simplify knowledge sharing, an important matter since first-hand experience from rare and extreme events is, naturally, rare. The knowledge base synthesizes actual decision making processes, complete with context, history, cues, and interactions and is captured through a combination of heterogeneous multimedia recordings, sensor readings, and documents relating to the mission. The approach can complement regular training and apprenticeships, to help establish and maintain a pool of knowledge and increase tactical commanders' recognition-primed decision-making capability.

An Integrated Model of Excellent Leadership in Public Relations: Dimensions, Measurement, and Validation

This study investigates the role of leadership in facilitating strategic communication management and effective public relations practice by proposing a set of dimensions measuring corporate communication executives’ perceptions on leadership. A measurement methodology was applied and suggested to facilitate empirical investigation. Data from two groups of senior corporate communicators and public relations executives (N = 384) nationwide were used to assess the validity and reliability of proposed leadership dimensions that contribute to effective communication management. Results from both groups demonstrated strong support for the proposed higher-order measurement model. The analysis suggested that 6 major dimensions (self-dynamics, team collaboration, ethical orientation, relationship building, strategic decision making capability, and communication knowledge management capability) are crucial for communication executives to expand their influence in the institutional context and generate desired communication outcomes. The findings offer insights on both leadership and corporate communications that may account for significant nonfinancial indictors of organizational effectiveness.

XML data mining: models, methods, and applications

The widespread use of XML in business and scientific databases has prompted the development of methodologies, techniques, and systems for effectively managing and analyzing XML data. This has increasingly attracted the attention of different research communities, including database, information retrieval, pattern recognition, and machine learning, from which several proposals have been offered to address problems in XML data management and knowledge discovery.XML Data Mining: Models, Methods, and Applications aims to collect knowledge from experts of database, information retrieval, machine learning, and knowledge management communities in developing models, methods, and systems for XML data mining. This book addresses key issues and challenges in XML data mining, offering insights into the various existing solutions and best practices for modeling, processing, analyzing XML data, and for evaluating performance of XML data mining algorithms and systems.

Video-based Performance Support Development for an Online Management Information System

The U.S. Defense Ammunition Center (DAC) has a mission to provide ammunition and explosives safety instruction, training, and logistics support to Department of Defense (DoD) military and civilian personnel worldwide. To effectively support its ammunition readiness mission, DAC collects, organizes, manages and disseminates information and knowledge that is both current and pertinent to the ammunition community. A major component of the DAC Knowledge Management strategy is the use of an online management information system (MIS) for controlling the use of different classes of ammunition. A key tool for successfully using an online MIS is an online performance support system. We discuss our efforts to develop a video-based performance support system for the U.S. Army’s Total Ammunition Management Information System (TAMIS), lessons learned, next steps, and the practice implications for the human factors, information technology, and knowledge management communities.