The design and maintenance of complex engineering systems such as a jet engine generates a significant amount of documentation. Increasingly, aerospace manufacturers are shifting their focus from selling products to providing services. As a result, when designing new engines, engineers must increasingly consider the life-cycle requirements in addition to design parameters. To identify possible areas of concern, engineers must obtain knowledge gained from the entire life of an engine. However, because of the size and distributed nature of a company’s operation, engineers often do not have access to front-line maintenance data. In addition, the large number of documents accrued makes it impossible to examine thoroughly. This paper presents a prototype knowledge-based document repository for such an application. It searches and analyzes distributed document resources, and provides engineers with a summary view of the underlying knowledge. The aim is to aid engineers in creating design requirement documents that incorporate aftermarket issues. Unlike existing document repositories and digital libraries, our approach is knowledge-based, where users browse summary reports instead of following suggested links. To test the validity of our proposed architecture, we have developed and deployed a working prototype. The prototype has been demonstrated to engineers and received positive reviews.

The objective of hypermedia design models is to produce a well-organised web site. The organisation is undertaken at the level of a particular building-block -- an abstract data unit which may match a frame, paragraph or region on a Web page. The increasing sophistication of these models allows the designer to deal with interaction and personalisation, but precludes one of the basic features of hypertext -- the text itself. This paper argues that this oversight remains a fundamental problem because the component of content production for many web sites is not an abstract data unit but the concepts embedded in the paragraphs, sentences and words of the content regions. Consequently there is a gap between the organisation of material and the origination of material that is not well-addressed by current design methods. The paper considers the problem of concept modelling in the Semantic Web, its implementation in various hypertext environments and whether this approach can inform the current generation of hypermedia design models.

Interest in Knowledge Management (herein ‘KM’) has soared in the last few years. Despite what might be said about the feasibility or robustness of the idea, undoubtedly one of its astounding ‘successes ’ is its heated diffusion among both academic and practitioner communities. This diffusion, together with its popularity among major consultancies suggest that it has the hallmarks of a management fashion, and is likely to disappear as quickly as it arrived. Indeed, the data we present in this paper indicate that this is likely to be the case. As such KM could be dismissed as not worthy of any serious investigation because its effects (if indeed there are any) will be short-lived. However, management fashions are arguably worthy of investigation in their own right. Fashions have symbolic or sign value- flagging up some organizational concerns as being more pressing or worthy of management attention at certain times than others. They also draw attention to, and legitimate the status and expertise of, those who are seen as being able to deal with those pressing problems. We argue therefore that the fashionization of ideas needs to be understood in relational terms. That is it comprises multiple professional networks (encompassing practitioners and suppliers) that seek to compete for and defend their claims to knowledge in relation to other professional groups in ways that relate to the activities and practices they are actually involved with in organizations. Ironically, a consequence of the colonization by professional groups is that ‘KM’, when applied in organizations, could become an example of the very problems that it seeks to address. Thus, adopting a broad perspective on knowledge as socially constructed ‘KM ’ itself is found to be an interesting example of the social construction of knowledge with the result here being that knowledge relevant to ‘KM ’ is both dispersed and disintegrated.

file:///Users/administrator/Desktop/papers/nicolawood/nwoodabstract.htm6/1/2005 5:35:25 pm abstract...1...2...3...4...5...6...references Nicola Wood is a professional interactive media designer and a research student at Sheffield Hallam University investigating the design of multimedia in learning. Her early background was in business and she has provided both organisational and creative support to a number of community-based and charitable organisations as well as to mainstream business. She developed an active role in the preservation of rural crafts through working in partnership with her husband, who has been a pioneer in rediscovering lost woodworking skills. This has provided the background to her current research, which involves collaboration with craftspeople and learners as well as engagement with questions of multimedia design. Craft skills were traditionally taught through apprenticeship, a time consuming process both for teacher and learner in a situation that discouraged innovation and development. New technologies offer the opportunity for learners to draw upon the skills of experienced craft practitioners whilst still directing their own learning at a pace and style that suits their craft practice. In my previous research (Wood 2003) I considered the design of multimedia to support learning of tacit knowledge; working with experienced practitioners who have some experience of teaching and have adopted strategies to overcome the problems. Skilled craftspeople are often not skilled teachers and my current research concentrates on eliciting knowledge from such people, who are unfamiliar with expressing what they know, and testing the veracity of the findings with learners. continue... / view as pdf

this paper may provide a model for assessing the knowledge processes with the construction industry. A further analysis of inter-organisational knowledge management, is provided by Levy et al's paper on knowledge sharing between SMEs (Levy, Loebbecke et al. 2001). This short paper highlights the notion of "co-opetition", simultaneous cooperation and competition. Of particular interest is the concept of using game-theory as a framework for analysing inter-organisational knowledge sharing where knowledge gained by co-operation may be exploited for competition (Levy, Loebbecke et al. 2001)

The World Wide Web offers access to a wealth of educational material; yet these are often weakly interlinked and fail to make explicit any real-world relationships. Ontological engineering support has been identified and stressed as one of the key limitations to overcome in building next generation web-based educational systems enabling knowledge sharing and reuse. In this paper we address this important issue by combining the strengths of hypermedia systems with the benefits of ontology-based systems to provide high quality, semantic-enabled web-based educational portals. We present Ontoportal: an ontological hypertext framework for building generic web-based educational portals. We also describe two simple case studies showing how the framework could be used to create ontology-based metadata and generate educational portals semantically interlinking various web-based educational resources (tutorials, assessments, courses, etc) for learning and teaching.