Stanford University March 24-26 Peer–Mediated Distributed Knowledge Management M. Bonifacio, P. Bouquet, G. Mameli, M. Nori AMKM-2003 Stanford University March 24-26

Traditional KM architectures: knowledge as content In the last 10 years, companies have invested huge amounts of money in order to manage knowledge adopting technological “carriers” (such as corporate knowledge portals or content management platforms). Conceptually, KM architectures are usually composed by: Collaborative environments: in order to facilitate the generation of “raw knowledge” Contribution workflows: in order to codify and standardize raw knowledge KBs: in order to collect contents organized according to a corporate conceptual schema EKP: in order to provide a single point of access for the members of different organizational units Enterprise knowledge portal KB Contribution WfS Assumption: Knowledge as content that can be centralized, standardized and controlled Collaborative tools

KM Has Greatly Underperformed the Tech Sector Some problems KM systems don’t match expectations: deserted by users that continue to develop, install and use local applications (7000 LN DBs at Andersen) not flexible nor interoperable and thus unable to adapt to organizational change and differentiation (Merging Banks, changing operating models) very difficult to maintain (people and resources are needed to keep it updated and populated, 500 people at Accenture) still benefits are not demonstrated (number of contributions and hits…?) KM Has Greatly Underperformed the Tech Sector

Our idea: Knowledge as Context Besides knowledge viewed as content, there are other forms of knowledge which are to be considered: Interpretative Context: people know how to interpret what happens and generate a language to talk about things and events. Context is a mean to interpret content Relational Context: people know who knows what and reduce complexity through trust and identity. Context as a mean to refer to other people. (People don’t believe in the paradigm of ideological sharing (all with all). They develop and use technologies if enable the sharing of knowledge within groups that evolve dynamically.) Value emerges when content is positioned within its context: conceptual schemas, web of relations, business processes… Local “Knowledges” Global Knowledge Address to trusted experts Interpret other contexts Knowledge as content Context Interpret content Content

Complex organizations as made up of Knowledge Nodes Knowledge Nodes are social entities that “own” a local knowledge in terms of a content that has meaning within a context Individuals Communities Teams A community internal web site Marketing Communiy R&D Sales Force Sales Project Team 1 Knowledge Network Content An individual’s file system directory or outlook folders Context Local Knowledge A lotus notes team room

Technological architecture of knowledge The inconsintency of the technological architectures in current KM systems From a technological point of view, current KM technologies are inconsistent with the very nature of knowledge and its social architecture  failure Social architecture of knowledge Technological architecture of knowledge KB Portal Social and technological architecture of knowledge AUTONOMY COORDINATION

From organization to the technological architecture: Actors and Roles in an Information Retrieval applications Organizational Actors Individual  K-Peer of a P2P network Group  K-Federation Roles Knowledge Seeker seeker module Knowledge Provider provider/federation module Broker (suggesting potential providers to seekers) brokering module K-Peer I know! New Tool? Marketing she knows! Community K-Federation Sales Force we know! Project Team 1 Community Community KnowledgeNetwork Sales R&D

From organization to the technological architecture: Knowledge Processes CONTEXT Vacation 2001 2000 Sea Lake Mountains Puglia Spain USA Create and manage a knowledge representation Context Markup Language Context Editor Context extraction tools Declare its existence in the network Advertisement Discover other available / active peers on the network Discovery module Ping module Ask, receive and provide information in and from them Knowledge Exchange module Discover, create and join to federation of peers Membership module Autonomy Coordination Coordination Sales Force R&D Marketing Sales Project Team 1 Peer Network Community Communiy

KEx (Knowledge Exchange): User interface for Seeker

Context management tool Search documents related to a focus Semantic search Search (Focus Source) Query (Focus Source) Matching Service Provider Seeker User GUI Document descriptors Focus Target Document descriptors Document descriptors Mail id Document name Document path Mail subject Document descriptors Perform a semantic match Context management tool P. Bouquet, A. Donà, L. Serafini, ConTeXtualized Local Ontology Specification via CTXML Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Meaning Negotiation, Edmonton (Alberta, Canada), July 28, 2002

Semantic Matching

Search documents that contain keywords Keyword based search Search (Keywords) Keywords Query (keywords) Indexing Service Provider Seeker User GUI Document descriptors Document descriptors Document descriptors Mail id Document name Document path Mail subject Document descriptors Search documents that contain keywords pst txt ppt html doc pdf xls ps Document repository

KEx: Knowledge Space

Context management tool Share these documents Provide documents Incoming query Document descriptor Green Table Concept ID Context management tool Outlook pst file + Keywords Association to concept Semantic matching File system Indexing Service Provider Indexing Service Lotus Notes repository Keyword matching Add to indexes Indexing Service Other content repositories Indexing Service

Conclusions and future works We have developed a P2P application (based on JXTA protocols) for DKM that provides functionalities such as: Seeker Provider Broker Federations management To be developed: Community Management: peers can suggest to users to which federations they should join since semantically similar to them (bottom up community formation) Push information services: peers can advertise services to other peers on the base of semantically relevant interests (targeted advertisement) Recommendation: peers can listen to other users or other peers requests and suggest where or what to look for (help new comers) Social Network Monitoring: Knowledge Managers can monitor the formation and evolution of trust networks and corporate languages

Thank you Gianluca Mameli: mameli@irst.itc.it Project: http://edamok.itc.it