Improving Systems Design

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The Delta Forum 2004Designing Integrating21st
Century Systems
Improving Systems Design Integration with
Knowledge Management
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/ar
ticles/default.asp?ArticleID949
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• Tacit knowledge impetus for knowledge capture
• People
• Aging workforce
• Distributed workforce
• Workforce turnover
• Whats lost - corporate knowledge, skills,
  lessons learned

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• Explicit Knowledge todays 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
27419headere_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/a
rticle.cfm?articleID00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC5
88EF21
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