Über einige Visionen beim Wissensmanagement

H. Maurer, TU Graz und Know-Center Graz

hmaurer@iicm.edu, www.iicm.edu/maurer

1. Konferenz

„Professionelles Wissensmanagement“

Baden-Baden, 14. März 2001

Structure of Presentation

1. Introduction

2. Three Aspects of Knowledge Management (KM)

3. Three Views of IT-Oriented KM3.1 The Organisational View3.2 The eLearning View3.3 The Societal View

4. Systemic Creation of New Knowledge

4.1 Intelligent Agents4.2 Active Documents4.3 Knowledge Landscapes

5. Outlook

1. Introduction

Danger: KM seen as new buzz word with negative connotation

This talk: Some visions and some achievements that show that KM is more than “Old wine in new bottles”

2. Three Major Elements of Knowledge Management

--- Knowledge Assessment(prime example: Scandia; prime technique: balanced score cards) --- Organisational Measures(including psychological/motivational techniques, incentive methods and introduction before using SW)--- Information Technology Oriented Techniques(usually a heterogeneous combination of QA, staging, KT, DB, System and other techniques)

This talk concentrates only on third aspect

3. Three Views of IT-Orientend KM

3.1 The Organisational View

3.2 The eLearning View

3.3 The Societal View

Knowledge Management:

“If our employees only knew what our employees know we would be a much better organisation.”

Challenge: Collect unobtrusively as much knowledge from persons into computer system; make knowledge easily available.

How can we gather “collective knowledge” of a group?

3.1 The Organisational View

The communication model

Features of Hyperwave support Knowledge Management:

– Four interwoven information retrieval paradigms (directories, links, attributes, searches)

– Automated link- and data management

– User administration and authorization classes

– Annotations, discussion forums, version control

– ... and much more

3.2 The eLearning View

eLearning = Knowledge Transfer (KT) !

Close relationship with KM

Indeed, some say KM includes KT, others say KT

includes KM!

Modern eLearning: more than WWW pages!

- Requires solid “learning platform”

- User profile defines sequence of multimedia/ interactive modules to be offered

- Rich body of background knowledge with systemic growth

- Strong communicational and collaborational features

- Good statistical, feedback and administrative features

Hyperwave‘s eLS (eLearning Suite): good example!

eLS : free for non-commercial school and university use

www.HAUP.org

www.hyperwave.de or www.hyperwave.com

3.3 The Societal View

Primitive (cave men) culture:Everyone could do almost everything

Continous historic development: Production more and more distributed

Today: Production completely distributed

(„arbeitsteilig“) yet access is universal!

Primitive (cave men) culture:everyone knew almost everything

Continuous historic development: knowledge more and more distributed

Today: knowledge very distributed, but access gets easier

Future:knowledge totally distributed („wissensteilig“) yet access is universal!

Consequence

- Individual knowledge supplementd by huge pool of knowledge

- Complex knowledge used like complex machinery

- Humans as individuals stop to exist: More and more cells of a new living being: humanity!

4. Systemic Creation of New Knowledge

4.1 Intelligent Agents

4.2 Active Documents4.3 Knowledge Landscapes

In this talk just a bit about 4.2 and 4.3

4.2 Active Documents

Main observation: Communication in KM and eLearning of paramount importance.

However: Communication not only human – human but also human – document!!!

Vision: Any document on the screen – any question can be asked. Document answers the question!

Is this a Science Fiction vision? Not really!

Implementation of Active Document concept:

Use the fact that many users look at same page!

Problem is reduced to:

When are different questions x and y semantically identical

Trick 1: Location specific FAQ

Trick 2: Fuzzy comparison

Trick 3: Restricted syntax and area-specific semantic network

4.3 Knowledge Landscapes

- Automatic generation of clusters of information using “similarity” of documents

- Important for any set of documents including discussion forums, etc.

- Can lead to automatically generated “knowledge landscapes”

- Typical application: Germany‘s largest electronic multimedia encyclopedia „Der Brockhaus – Multimedial 2001 Premium“

Systemic action include e.g. “landscape generation”:looking up one entry shows landscapes of related ones:

Klicking in the landscape generated by “space exploration” on “space probes” has lead us to this contribution – with a new information landscape and pictures of e.g. one of the space probes

One of the pictures associated with space probes

5. Outlook

- KM does not just increase efficiency of organisations

- KM is not just essential for eLearning

- KM will change fabric of our lives and society

We are just seeing the first steps: conferences like this and the I-KNOW conference July 12/13 at Graz/Austria are important further steps forward!

Thank you for your attention.

H. Maurer

Important URL‘s:

www.haup.org

www.hyperwave.de

www.know-center.at/en/conference

www.iicm.edu/maurer

email: hmaurer@iicm.edu