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Tech Report kmi-97-02 Abstract


Representing Hard-to-Formalise, Contextualised, Multidisciplinary, Organisational Knowledge
Techreport ID: kmi-97-02
Date: 1997
Author(s): Simon Buckingham Shum
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Much organisational knowledge is multidisciplinary, hard to formalise, and generated in discussions with competing viewpoints. Knowledge Management (KM) technologies need to be able to capture and share such knowledge. This short paper begins by characterising 'knowledge work' - are there salient features that we can identify? Next, an approach is described by which teams analyse and discuss problems, building graphical argument spaces as competing ideas are debated. Hypermedia groupware provides a way to embed ideas, decisions and rationale in their conversational context, and with other work artifacts such as reports, sketches and simulations. The orientation of this work emphasises the human dimensions to technologies for supporting organisational memory and expertise. The discussion seeks to situate this approach in relation to other KM approaches by proposing three questions that seek to clarify the interdependencies between economics, technologies, work practices, and the responsibilities of modelling and managing knowledge. (This is a modified, and shortened, version of a paper presented at the Workshop on Knowledge Media for Improving Organisational Expertise, 1st International Conference on Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management, Basel, Switzerland, 30-31 Oct. 1996: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/kmi-abstracts/kmi-tr-30-abstract.html)

Publication(s):

To appear in: AIKM'97: AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence in Knowledge Management (Mar. 24-26, 1997), Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. AAAI Press
 
KMi Publications Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities