10 Years Anniversary of Knowledge Maturing Model at I-KNOW 2015

Ronald Maier and Andreas Schmidt together with Christine Kunzmann organized the special track Social Knowledge Management at I-KNOW 2015. With the advent of social media, knowledge manage­ment had to rethink its conceptual foundations on how knowledge develops on a collective level. 

 

Andreas Schmidt opened the session with a look back on how the field has evolved. Ten years ago, at I-KNOW 2005, the very first version of the knowledge maturing model was presented, aiming at integrating diverse perspectives on knowledge, and since then, numerous cross-disciplinary research activities have contributed to the extension and refinement of the model. At the heart is the insight that knowledge develops along distinct phases in which its characteristics and thus requirements for support change. It brings to­gether different perspectives and provides a frame­work for analysis and design of interventions.

 

Together with Christine Kunzmann, Andreas Schmidt continued to present recent research from the EmployID project. It concentrated on the use of patterns as structured description of experiential knowledge intended for reuse. They presented a tool-chain in which socio-technical patterns can be developed from peer coaching activities in which eliciting of motivational and affective aspects becomes possible, via a collaborative editing system Living Documents to social learning programmes to disseminate to and engage with a wider audience.

 

 

Dominik Stange presented an approach to sharing domain expertise that has been previously acquired with others in an automotive company. 

 

 

René Peinl from Hof University of Applied Sciences presented an open-source technology arrangement for supporting the maturing of process knowledge via process mining in the context of adaptive case management. The solution concentrated on web-based document-based collaboration, which is well-suited for software-as-a-service offerings for SMEs.

 

 

Tobias Ley from Tallinn University presented an infrastructure for social semantics that provides services for implementing different approaches to social knowledge management. It consists of microservices that can be flexibly reused in application scenarios.

 

 

Rebekka Alm from IGD Rostock presented an ontology-based approach to assistance and sharing information for assembly tasks in manifacturing.

 

The track concluded after several interesting perspectives on the topic of social knowledge management with a discussion on remaining challenges in the field. It became apparent that although social media in knowledge management seems to be well established, there are still considerable issues ahead which are well worth exploring. While there are also challenges in the fields of technology, such as detecting relevant documents or support in a specific context (which has been an issue for more than 10 years), a lot has concentrated on more social and organizational issues, such as the trade-offs between formal and informal processes and structures, the conflicts with corporate cultures and the conflicts between different institutional logics and whether tools transform culture or should adapt to the culture. Finally, measurement, indicators and what is considered successful social knowledge management was agreed to be a hot topic.

 

We are looking forward to picking up those research challenges into our activities in the upcoming weeks. E.g., some of those fit into the work that has been going on in the EmployID project. 

 

 

Morning presentations

• Christine Kunzmann, Andreas P. Schmidt, Carmen Wolf: Facilitating maturing of socio-technical patterns through social learning approaches
• Dominic Stange, Andreas Nürnberger: When Experts Collaborate: Sharing Search and Domain Expertise within an Organization
• Christian Ochsenkühn, René Peinl: Collaborative process maturing support by mining activity streams

Afternoon presentations

• Sebastian Dennerlein, Dieter Theiler, Dominik Kowald, Emanuel Lacic, Elisabeth Lex, Tobias Ley: The Social Semantic Server: A Flexible Framework to Support Informal Learning at the Workplace
• Rebekka Alm, Mario Aehnelt, Bodo Urban: Processing Manufacturing Knowledge with Ontology-based Annotations and Cognitive Architecture