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ManagementTracking the Constant of Change

ManagementHistory

Society Legal Aspects

LogisticsSupply Chain

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MultidisciplineDesign

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04/10/23 1Engineering & Technology Management Group

Improving Systems Design & Integration with Knowledge Management

The Delta Forum 2004Designing & Integrating

21st Century Systems

JoAnne R. Calhoun

NASA Scientific and Technical Information Program Office

AIAA Technical Information Committee

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Overview

Why knowledge management is still relevant

Content Management Challenge of 21st Century

KM Tools and Applications

Semantic Web and Web Services change KM

Conclusions

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Knowledge Management - 20th Century concept relevant for 21st Century systems

Getting the right information to the right people at the right time

Knowledge management refers to strategies and structures for maximizing the return on intellectual and information resources

• Tacit form (human education, experience and expertise)

• Explicit forms (documents and data)

Creates new value by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of individual and collaborative efforts to organize and use information resources

Increases innovation and improves decision-making

*Source: “Defining Knowledge Management”, destinationKM.com, http://www.destinationkm.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=949

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Tacit knowledge – impetus for knowledge capture

People

• Aging workforce

• Distributed workforce

• Workforce turnover

What’s lost - corporate knowledge, skills, lessons learned

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Explicit Knowledge – today’s employees expected to be knowledgeable on topics outside areas of expertise, ie, marketing, best practices, benchmarking, state-of-the art technologies, return-on-investments, etc. Many sources of information, most of which use different search and retrieval engines, passwords, some full-text, some not; in sum, finding relevant information is a time-consuming challenge

Sources of content –

• Books• Technical reports• Journal articles and conference proceedings• Newspapers• Trade publications• Standards and Specifications• Engineering Drawings• Employee Directories• Market and Financial Data• Product Information

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21st Century Challenges for Knowledge Manager to Design and Integrate Systems

• Understanding user community

• Selecting resources/services for user community

• Organizing and enabling access to resources and services for knowledge discovery

• How to make these resources/services available to users in the short-term and over time

Greatest challenge for knowledge managers is content management

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21st Century Content Management Issues

Electronic vs print

• Data conversion, data storage, digital preservation

Commercial vs free

• Commercial vendors “leasing” data at exorbitant prices – long term impact?

• Web content – free but how good is it? Authoritativeness, accuracy, non-peer reviewed, permanency, overwhelming amount content, what to collect

Structured vs unstructured data

• Structured data – database, meta-tagging - organized, manipulate

• Unstructured – web, full-text docs, pictures – difficult capture, organize, and make searchable

Emerging standards for data exchange – different organizations coming up with competing specifications

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Knowledge Management tools

Tools fall into one or more of the following categories (tools range from single application to enterprise solutions):

• Knowledge repositories

• Experts directory tools

• E-learning applications

• Discussion and chat technologies

• Collaboration and workflow tools

• Search and data mining tools

• Portals

• Classification and categorization tools

• Enterprise Content Management packages

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KM Applications

Brief Overview

• Search engines

• Collaborative environment

• Enterprise content management

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KM for Knowledge Discovery through Search Engines

Enterprise search engines (behind firewall)

• Make corporate/enterprise content searchable• Search across Intranets, portals, databases, document

repositories already on network• Keyword, concept, and full-text searching • Built-in taxonomies and classification structure to allow

for directory structures that allow users to navigate through topics,

• Recommendation services based upon searching history

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Search Engines for Internet – Challenge of the “Deep Web”

Surface web – Web content found by traditional search engines that use web crawlers and spiders to index data on websites – static sites

Deep Web – content found in web accessible databases – dictionaries, phone directories, patents, laws, multimedia, news, jobs, financial information – dynamic content

Traditional Internet search engines do not index deep web site; sites with listing of searchable databases

Deep web searching• Public information on the deep Web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the

commonly defined World Wide Web. • The deep Web contains nearly 550 billion individual documents compared to the

one billion of the surface Web. • The deep Web is the largest growing category of new information on the

Internet. • Deep Web sites tend to be narrower, with deeper content, than conventional

surface sites. • A full ninety-five per cent of the deep Web is publicly accessible information —

not subject to fees or subscriptions.

Source: Technology white paper, “The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Values,” Bergman, Michael K., BrightPlanet website, July 2001, http://www.brightplanet.com/technology/deepweb.asp

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KM to Create Collaborative Environment

Definitions of community of practice vary somewhat, but are usually taken to mean a group of practitioners who share a common interest or passion in an area of competence and are willing to share the experiences of their practice.*

Collaborative tools/software packages build online communities of subject matter specialists and collective pools of knowledge, provide online forums to contribute ideas and answer, searchable discussions lists, locate experts, white boarding, document sharing, membership management

* Source: “Communities for knowledge management,” by Stephen Denning, article found at http://www.stevedenning.com/communities_knowledge_management.html

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KM for Enterprise Content Management

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the technologies, tools, and methods used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content across an enterprise.*

Combines all facets of knowledge management for an enterprise: web publishing, document repositories, multimedia archives, search and retrieval, and workflows. End-to-end content creation, publishing, archiving, and searching.

Source, “Enterprise Content Management. What is it? Why should you care?” Duhon, Bryant, AIIM E-Doc Magazine, November/December 2003, http://www.edocmagazine.com/vault_articles.asp?ID=27419&header=e_features_header.gif

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KM, Semantic Web, and Web Services

• KM tools tend to be proprietary niche products

• Semantic Web and Web Services are move towards open-source protocols for machine communication

• Potential to change the way and the kinds of information collected, disseminated, archived

• New information products and services for knowledge managers and their organizations

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Semantic Web

Semantic Web is not a separate web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. *

Current web designed for humans to read. Semantic web will allow semantic agents to share data among computers, applications, and programs depending upon context of the data using XML and RDF.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, text format publishing language used for electronic publishing and data exchange.+

Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a foundation for processing metadata; it provides interoperability between applications that exchange machine-understandable information on the Web.++

* Source: “The Semantic Web,” Berners-Lee, Tim; Hendler, James; and Lassila, Ora, Scientific American.com, May 12, 2001, http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21

+Source: “Web services activity,” W3C, http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/

++Source: “Resource Description Framewrok (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification, W3C, http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222/

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Web Services

Web services are programmatic interfaces that allow applications to talk to one another. Communication protocols enable computer systems and business processes to seek each other out over Internet

Companies IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle and standard organizations like W3C, Oasis (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) to work on standards for web specification

Potential problems:

• Different standard organizations creating specifications that are incompatible

• Patent and licensing fees, restrictions to use specifications – not all open source

Gartner research group predicts American businesses are going to squander $1 Billion on web service projects by 2007

Source: “The Battle for Web Services,” Koch, Christopher, CIO Magazine, Oct 2003, http://www.cio.com/archive/100103/standards.html

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Conclusions - Knowledge Management and 21st Century Systems

Knowledge management is relevant concept for the 21st Century

Problems of the past – data integrity, integration, interoperability – have not been solved

KM tools will continue to focus on:

• Collaborative environment web enabled services to improve communication between employees, mentoring, and e-learning

• End-to-end content creation, archiving, delivery, and management for knowledge discovery and reuse

• Better search engines for search and retrieval of relevant information

• Standardization of data formats and protocols for interoperability for building knowledge bases, leveraging web resources, and creating multidisciplinary content repositories

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