Reflections on Knowledge Management
J.UCS Special Issue
Klaus Tochtermann
(Graz University of Technology & Know-Center Graz, Austria
ktochter@know-center.at)
Gisela Dösinger
(Know-Center Graz, Austria
gdoes@know-center.at)
Knowledge management has been called everything from innovative and
crucial to new wine in old bottles and dead. Usually, different
perceptions spring from different perspectives. The aim of this
special issue is to bring a broad array of these perspectives
together, to learn from each other and to jointly find promising ways
ahead for the future. This special issue makes available extended
versions of the best contributions evaluated by the international
expert committee of I-KNOW '06, the 6th International
Conference on Knowledge Management (http://www.i-know.at). The purpose of
this issue is to provide in-depth reflections on novel ideas for
knowledge management research and next-generation knowledge management
solutions. To achieve this objective, the contributions of this
special issue fall into two categories. The first group of
contributions focuses on collaborative knowledge work in defined
areas. The second group deals with knowledge management aspect on an
organisational level.
The following four contributions address collaborative knowledge
work in the context of decision making, roadmapping, entrepreneurial
knowledge sharing, and ontology creation.
In their contribution Seeing versus Arguing: The
Moderation Role of Collaborative Visualization in Team Knowledge
Integration Jeanne Mengis and Martin J. Eppler discuss a
number of communicative challenges with reference to team knowledge
integration. They show how collaborative visualisation moderates team
knowledge integration and hence can improve decision making.
Vana Kamtsiou, Ambjörn Naeve, Lampros K. Stergioulas and Tapio
Koskinen in their contribution Roadmapping as a Knowledge
Creation Process: The PROLEARN Roadmap refine and enhance
existing roadmapping methodologies, create a conceptual model of the
road mapping processes and apply the SECI spiral of knowledge
creation.
Storytelling in the context of entrepreneurial knowledge sharing in
communities is discussed in Virtual
Entrepreneurship Lab 2.0: Sharing Entrepreneurial Knowledge by
Non-linear Storytelling by Ralf Klamma, Marc Spaniol and
Dominik Renzel. They present the Virtual Entrepreneurship Lab 1.0
which is a learning environment based on the MPEG-7 metadata standard
where students can consume and create non-linear stories.
In their contribution Consensus
Building in Collaborative Ontology Engineering Processes
Stelios Karapiperis and Dimitris Apostolou outline a methodology for
collaborative ontology creation with an embedded mechanism which
evaluates the quality and acceptance of the resultant ontology by a
group of participants. They highlight the benefits but also the
challenges that must be faced when collaboratively designing an
ontology.
The next group of contributions go beyond certain application
areas. They address issues concerning the entire organisation. The
contributions range form intellectual capital management and knowledge
management best practice cases to knowledge management in project
based organisations.
In Towards a Model
for Creating Comparable Intellectual Capital Reports Martin
Nemetz picks up the problem of the non-comparability of intellectual
capital reports due to the diversity of used conceptions. To tackle
this problem he develops a meta-model framework and shows its
applicability and usefulness by means of a practical example.
Mark Hefke, Knut Jäger and Andreas Abecker entitled their
contribution Best
Practice Cases for Knowledge Management and Their Portability to Other
Organisations where they introduce their ontology-based
reference model for the reuse and transferability of knowledge
management best practice cases. Using indicators for the general
description of organisations, critical knowledge management success
factors and indicators for the transferability their model allows for
similarity-based retrieval. The approach is based on the combination
of case-based reasoning methods and ontological background knowledge.
In their contribution An integrated view of KM:
Toward a Project Learning Organization Roberta Cuel and
Filippo Manfredi deal with knowledge management in project based
organisations. They describe the concept of project learning
organisations, the model of projects life cycle and the model of
knowledge coordination processes among projects, and their alignment
with corporate knowledge.
The last, but not less important contribution is another bit more
general than the previously described, since it deals with service
oriented architectures. In Performance Solution of
SOA Infrastructure for Knowledge Computing Miroslav
Kubásek, Jan Pavlovič and Tomáš Gregar present
a complete solution of SOA designed for knowledge computation
encapsulation. SOA represents a functional encapsulation of
computations and simplifies the communication interface between
application and presentation logic.
We hope that this special issue provides the reader with a
comprehensive overview of contributions which represent not only
sophisticated reflection on knowledge management but also a true
advancement beyond the state-of-the-art.
Klaus Tochtermann and Gisela Dösinger
Graz, December 2006
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