Week 8 : Knowledge Management Tools

On 26 of July 2013 , we had our lecture 8 and 9 of TKM 1291 introduction to Knowledge Management. Since Chapter is not important we just went through it .

 

Then Madam continued teaching Lecture 9 right after she finished teaching Lecture 8. The topic of Lecture 8 is Knowledge Management Tools . So basically there are few learning outcomes that we must cover as usual. They are : -

·         To describe different component technologies found in KM

·         To explain different technologies for capturing, organizing, storing and sharing new knowledge

·         To contrast the functions of different component technologies

·         To select appropriate KM technologies for particular needs

Basically we can say that, knowledge comes in a variety of form such as:

·         Structured: financial data, sales data, customer data, demographic data

·         Semi-Structured: cases, policies, procedures, action plans

·         Unstructured: documents, e-mails, presentations, video

The figure shows about the major KM Techniques, Tools and Technologies used.

 

Figure 1

 

We then studied types of capturing knowledge. They are:

·         Cognitive mapping tools: This mapping tool is a visual representation of the domain which makes explicit mentally the concepts that exist within the domain and the relationship between them.The map is probably to be tacit and unarticulated within individual or organization.

·         Information retrieval tools: There are 2 main processes basically, which are

¨       Create index – enables the location of a text and document structure (logical view); speed up retrieval & reduce computational cost

¨       Solve user’s information needs in the form of query through algorithms and ranking the results in some form of relevance to the user.

·         Search engines. Information retrieval principles are applied in a wide range of environments and for a range of purposes.

·         Agent technology. Agents are computer systems that are capable of autonomous action in a given environment in order to fulfil their design objectives. The applications used are:

¨       Electronic mail filtering

¨       Agent wrappers- update critical organisation functions periodically

¨       Processing text in documents to identify key sentences

¨       Business new feeds

·         Personalisation :-

Besides, we also learnt about sharing knowledge. It can be done by:

·         Internet/Intranet.

·         Web 2.0 Platform.

·         Blogs.

·         Syndications & RSS Feeds.

·         Mashups .

·         Wikis.

·         Online social networks.

·         3-D virtual sharing.

·         Groupware tools.

·         Application tools.

We can evaluate the knowledge that we captured or shared by:

·         Case-based reasoning.

·         On-Line analytical processing (OLAP).

·         Data mining.

·         Data warehouse.

Hence, in order to present our knowledge, we have to visualize it. There are few steps for the visualisation. Such as:

·         Modelling – way of representing objects e.g. journal covers, weather maps, flows of citations.

·         Rendering – makes computer generated image look like photograph e.g. texture mapping.

·         Virtual reality.