Tech Reports
Tech Report kmi-97-01 Abstract
Balancing Formality with Informality: User-Centred Requirements for Knowledge Management Technologies
Techreport ID: kmi-97-01
Date: 1997
Author(s): Simon Buckingham Shum
Numerous disciplines are now trying to analyse and represent the processes and products of organisational memory, in order to clarify what tangible representations future knowledge managers will work with. This short paper begins by reflecting briefly on the nature of systematic representations, as a reminder of the commitments that are made in any classification process. It is argued that there are important political dimensions to such classification, with implications for knowledge modelling. The paper then identifies three processes by which organisational expertise is shared. These processes may represent both a challenge and an opportunity for knowledge modelling approaches. The closing discussion pinpoints formalisation as a particularly important process in knowledge management, considers technologies that support incremental formalisation as holding particular promise, and proposes the principle that only stable, sanctioned knowledge should be formalised, in order to avoid the many problems caused by premature formalisation of organisational knowledge.
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
Future Internet
KnowledgeManagementMultimedia &
Information SystemsNarrative
HypermediaNew Media SystemsSemantic Web &
Knowledge ServicesSocial Software
Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...
Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...
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