Bookisms:

In this issue we review three books, two of which deal with knowledge and knowledge management and the third deals with the many collaboration techniques coming to market. The first two are solid works by people who are leaders in the field, including Laurence Prusak, coauthor with Tom Davenport of the most widely read Knowledge management book (Davenport and Prusak, 1995) published in the United States (see review in Volume 15, No. 3, Summer 1998 issue of ISM) and Ikujiro Nonaka (1991) Nonaka, I. 1991. The knowledge creating company.. Harvard Business Review, : 96–104. November-December). [Google Scholar] from Japan who wrote the original knowledge management article in Harvard Business Review. The third book, Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and coauthor, praises collaboration developments from Wikis to MySpace and beyond, written in a breathless, advertising style that may not appeal to everyone.     

On querying simple conceptual graphs with negation

We consider basic conceptual graphs, namely simple conceptual graphs (SGs), which are equivalent to the existential conjunctive positive fragment of first-order logic. The fundamental problem, deduction, is performed by a graph homomorphism called projection. The existence of a projection from a SG Q to a SG G means that the knowledge represented by Q is deducible from the knowledge represented by G. In this framework, a knowledge base is composed of SGs representing facts and a query is itself a SG. We focus on the issue of querying SGs, which highlights another fundamental problem, namely query answering. Each projection from a query to a fact defines an answer to the query, with an answer being itself a SG. The query answering problem asks for all answers to a query.

This paper introduces atomic negation into this framework. Several understandings of negation are explored, which are all of interest in real world applications. In particular, we focus on situations where, in the context of incomplete knowledge, classical negation is not satisfactory because deduction can be proven but there is no answer to the query. We show that intuitionistic deduction captures the notion of an answer and can be solved by projection checking. Algorithms are provided for all studied problems. They are all based on projection. They can thus be combined to deal with several kinds of negation simultaneously. Relationships with problems on conjunctive queries in databases are recalled and extended. Finally, we point out that this discussion can be put in the context of semantic web databases.     

AR/MR Remote Collaboration on Physical Tasks: A Review

This paper provides a review of research into using Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality(MR) for remote collaboration on physical tasks. AR/MR-based remote collaboration on physical tasks has recently become more prominent in academic research and engineering applications. It has great potential in many fields, such as real-time remote medical consultation, education, training, maintenance, remote assistance in engineering, and other remote collaborative tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge there has not been any comprehensive review of research in AR/MR remote collaboration on physical tasks. Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of research between 2000 and 2018 in this domain. We collected 215 papers, more than 80% of which were published between 2010 and 2018, and all relevant works are discussed at length. Then we elaborate on the review from typical architectures, applications (e.g., industry, telemedicine, architecture, teleducation and others), and empathic computing. Next, we made an in-depth review of the papers from seven aspects: (1) collection and classification research, (2) using 3D scene reconstruction environments and live panorama, (3) periodicals and conducting research, (4) local and remote user interfaces, (5) features of user interfaces commonly used, (6) architecture and sharing non-verbal cues, (7) applications and toolkits. We find that most papers (160 articles, 74.4%) are published in conferences, using co-located collaboration to emulate remote collaboration is adopted by more than half (126, 58.6%) of the reviewed papers, the shared non-verbal cues can be mainly classified into five types (Virtual Replicas or Physical Proxy(VRP), AR Annotations or a Cursor Pointer(ARACP), avatar, gesture, and gaze), the local/remote interface is mainly divided into four categories (Head-Mounted Displays(HMD), Spatial Augmented Reality(SAR), Windows-Icon-Menu-Pointer(WIMP) and Hand-Held Displays(HHD)). From this, we can draw ten conclusions. Following this we report on issues for future works. The paper also provides an overall academic roadmap and useful insight into the state-of-the-art of AR/MR remote collaboration on physical tasks. This work will be useful for current and future researchers who are interested in collaborative AR/MR systems.     

The Leading Edge in is Management

Jean Lipman-Blumen and Harold J. Leavitt, Hot Groups: Seeding Them, Feeding Them, and Using Them to Ignite Your Organization, New York: Oxford University Press (1999) 296 pp.

Thomas H. Davenport, Mission Critical: Realizing the Promise of Enterprise Systems, Boston: Harvard Business School Press (2000) 336 pp.

W.H. Inmon, Ken. Rudin, Christopher K. Buss, and Ryan Sousa, Data Warehouse Performance, New York: Wiley (1999) 444 pp.

Jay Liebowitz (ed.) Knowledge Management Handbook, CRC Press (1999) 312 pp.     

Ubiquitous computing and interaction

A short overview of the emerging field ubiquitous computing is given. It is argued, that this technology, characterized as highly distributed and interactive, requires a shift of focus from the traditional view of computer science as a domain of computable functions and turing machines (TM) to a cybernetic view of energy–signal–control cycles. This is accompanied by a reconsideration of interface-technology and the derivation of a new type of locally controlled signal to energy transformation based on the continuity of energy flow. It is shown how the concept of hyper-bonds could serve some requirements in this new field. Some applications in mixed reality and mechatronics are given and further perspectives for human–machine collaboration, human skills, and knowledge are presented.     

面向认知协作的知识管理研究

为有效地对业务过程中知识管理进行研究,探讨了本体描述的认知协作概念,分析了知识流中认知协作的特征。以角色为认知主体的抽象表示,讨论了知识流中的角色协作,依据知识流的流向,将角色协作区分为相邻任务角色协作和相同任务角色协作。最后,以软件开发过程为例说明了两类角色协作的区别。     

The New Business Currency

Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press (2001), 253 pp.

Brad Hansen, The Dictionary of Computing and Digital Media: Terms and Acronyms, Wilsonville, OR: Franklin, Beedle, and Associates (1999), 543 pp.

Piotr Jankowski and Timothy Nyerges, Geographic Information Systems for Group Decision Making: Towards a Participatory Geographic Information Science, New York: Taylor and Francis (2001), 273 pp.

Jeffrey A. Rohlfs, Bandwagon Effects in High Technology Industries, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2001), 256 pp.     

Knowledge-based system for collaborative process specification

This paper presents an ontology-based approach for the design of a collaborative business process model (CBP). This CBP is considered as a specification of needs in order to build a collaboration information system (CIS) for a network of organizations. The study is a part of a model-driven engineering approach of the CIS in a specific enterprise interoperability framework that will be summarised. An adaptation of the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is used to represent the CBP model. We develop a knowledge-based system (KbS) which is composed of three main parts: knowledge gathering, knowledge representation and reasoning, and collaborative business process modelling. The first part starts from a high abstraction level where knowledge from business partners is captured. A collaboration ontology is defined in order to provide a structure to store and use the knowledge captured. In parallel, we try to reuse generic existing knowledge about business processes from the MIT Process Handbook repository. This results in a collaboration process ontology that is also described. A set of rules is defined in order to extract knowledge about fragments of the CBP model from the two previous ontologies. These fragments are finally assembled in the third part of the KbS. A prototype of the KbS has been developed in order to implement and support this approach. The prototype is a computer-aided design tool of the CBP. In this paper, we will present the theoretical aspects of each part of this KbS as well as the tools that we developed and used in order to support its functionalities.     

Cross-Fertilization Between Human Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing: Why and How

Many of the central notions and ultimate goals of both human-computer interaction (HCI) and natural language processing (NLP) are common to both disciplines. Both are concerned with communication as a core concept, and both attempt to maximize the naturalness of this communication for the end-user. A central challenge to both disciplines is the issue of the choice and adaptation of the appropriate form of communication for the specific user and context at hand. Despite these strong commonalities, we observe very little collaboration, cross-references or even mutual knowledge between the HCI and NLP communities. And, surprisingly enough, although their goals might be very similar, the methods and the evaluation frameworks used in both research and applicative work in both areas are distinct. We think that it is time to step back and re-assess the potential for collaboration between the two disciplines.In this paper, we argue that importing ideas and methods from each discipline into the other can be fruitful, and we review specific areas where this is the case. We argue that cross-fertilization between HCI and NLP is desirable in wider and in more fundamental ways than only for the design of natural language interfaces. The reflection presented in this paper is motivated by our own work over the last four years in a team comprised of both HCI and specialists in natural language generation (NLG), a subfield of NLP specifically concerned with the automatic generation of language.     

Flexible workspace design and ergonomics training: impacts on the psychosocial work environment, musculoskeletal health, and work effectiveness among knowledge workers

A macroergonomics intervention consisting of flexible workspace design and ergonomics training was conducted to examine the effects on psychosocial work environment, musculoskeletal health, and work effectiveness in a computer-based office setting. Knowledge workers were assigned to one of four conditions: flexible workspace (n=121), ergonomics training (n=92), flexible workspace+ergonomics training (n=31), and a no-intervention control (n=45). Outcome measures were collected 2 months prior to the intervention and 3 and 6 months post-intervention. Overall, the study results indicated positive, significant effects on the outcome variables for the two intervention groups compared to the control group, including work-related musculoskeletal discomfort, job control, environmental satisfaction, sense of community, ergonomic climate, communication and collaboration, and business process efficiency (time and costs). However, attrition of workers in the ergonomics training condition precluded an evaluation of the effects of this intervention. This study suggests that a macroergonomics intervention is effective among knowledge workers in office settings.     

A framework for knowledge-based temporal abstraction

A new domain-independent knowledge-based inference structure is presented, specific to the task of abstracting higher-level concepts from time-stamped data. The framework includes a model of time, parameters, events and contexts. A formal specification of a domain's temporal abstraction knowledge supports acquisition, maintenance, reuse and sharing of that knowledge.

The knowledge-based temporal abstraction method decomposes the temporal abstraction task into five subtasks. These subtasks are solved by five domain-independent temporal abstraction mechanisms. The temporal abstraction mechanisms depend on four domain-specific knowledge types: structural, classification (functional), temporal semantic (logical) and temporal dynamic (probabilistic) knowledge. Domain values for all knowledge types are specified when a temporal abstraction system is developed.

The knowledge-based temporal abstraction method has been implemented in the RÉSUMÉ system and has been evaluated in several clinical domains (protocol-based care, monitoring of children's growth and therapy of diabetes) and in an engineering domain (monitoring of traffic control), with encouraging results.     

Restructuring decision tables for elucidation of knowledge

Decision tables are widely used in many knowledge-based and decision support systems. They allow relatively complex logical relationships to be represented in an easily understood form and processed efficiently. This paper describes second-order decision tables (decision tables that contain rows whose components have sets of atomic values) and their role in knowledge engineering to: (1) support efficient management and enhance comprehensibility of tabular knowledge acquired by knowledge engineers, and (2) automatically generate knowledge from a tabular set of examples. We show how second-order decision tables can be used to restructure acquired tabular knowledge into a condensed but logically equivalent second-order table. We then present the results of experiments with such restructuring. Next, we describe SORCER, a learning system that induces second-order decision tables from a given database. We compare SORCER with IDTM, a system that induces standard decision tables, and a state-of-the-art decision tree learner, C4.5. Results show that in spite of its simple induction methods, on the average over the data sets studied, SORCER has the lowest error rate.     

Silo Persistence: It's not the Technology,it's the Culture!

Our article acknowledges technologies and enterprise solutions as common tools for knowledge management deployed to help foster collaboration. Though the tools are made widely available by forward-thinking executives, and though there is a torrent of knowledge management thought as evidenced in the ample literature, knowledge workers continue to have difficulties transitioning to acting out the commonly accepted philosophy of sharing knowledge. The focus of our comments is a review to highlight some of the primary technical and behavior barriers hindering the use of collaborative technology. In this article a combination of content analysis and professional observation were used to provide practical insight concerning how enterprises, small and large can address the challenges of information silos, with or without technical KM or Web 2.0 solutions.     

Using technological functions on a multi-touch table and their affordances to counteract biases and foster collaborative problem solving

Touch technologies have become ubiquitous, motivating researchers to explore their potential - especially in collaborative scenarios. Studies on collaboration using joint visual spaces like multi-touch tables have demonstrated positive effects on performance. Yet, factors like prior knowledge and preferences, resulting in cognitive biases, were neglected although they are likely to put additional demands on collaboration. Whether touch technology can support its users in mastering the resulting challenges remains an open issue. To address this issue, we employed a hidden-profile paradigm (e.g., Schulz-Hardt and Mojzisch 2012) to investigate whether the affordances of specific support functions realized in a collaboration support kit on a multi-touch table help to overcome established pitfalls of collaboration (prior preferences and discussion biases). The collaboration support kit comprised a joint space and private spaces. It allowed participants to push information from the private into the joint space, to jointly sort information within the joint space, and it provided automatic functions like merging information. To replicate traditional hidden-profile studies, triads in a standard hidden-profile condition (n?=?25) exchanged information in a discussion; triads in the condition with collaboration support kit (n?=?29) were additionally provided with the aforementioned functions. Our results revealed that groups with collaboration support kit available showed greater discussion intensity, more balanced discussions, more indicators of mutual understanding, and better decision performance than standard hidden-profile groups. This is original evidence that affordances of a multi-touch table with interactive support functions can be used to overcome biases from prior preferences and to enhance collaboration.     

Blending scenarios of use and informal argumentation to facilitate universal access: experience with the Universal Access Assessment Workshop method

The accessibility of interactive computer-based products and services has long been an issue of concern to the Assistive Technology (AT) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) communities. In recent years, there have been several efforts aiming to document the consolidated wisdom in the form of general guidelines and examples of best practice. Despite their sound human factors content, these guidelines require substantial interpretation by designers, before they can generate practically useful and context-specific recommendations. In this paper, we examine how this task can be aided by blending scenarios of use and informal argumentation in the context of a structured technique referred to as Universal Access Assessment Workshop (UA²W). The paper provides a review of the technique and proposes two instruments, namely scenario screening and growth scenarios, which can be used to structure the conduct of UA²Ws. Finally, the paper summarises recent experiences in the use of these techniques in the context of a case study, which seeks to provide universal access insight to the design of a ward-based service to patient medical data.     

Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies

This review considers the work in Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies, an anthology edited by Laura McGrath that examines the evolving significance of collaboration within the English classroom. This book contributes to the discussion of collaboration in several meaningful ways, including connecting collaboration to interesting digital tools and moving beyond merely considering the discipline's concern of scholarly production to instead examine the evolution of collaboration's relationship between teaching, technology, and user creativity. McGrath's work is divided into two sections, one that addresses scholarly concerns and one that addresses pedagogical concerns. Several important components of English studies are addressed throughout the text such as affinity spaces, the work of writing centers, graduate student research contributions, cross-cultural understandings of text, and interdisciplinary research. McGrath and the contributing authors succeed in providing a thorough argument for continued collaboration in the discipline as well as a clear suggestion that the digitization of the field is a challenging and valuable necessity. Readers from English studies graduate students to full-time faculty to practitioners in the field can appreciate the depth of the theoretical background, the pedagogical implications for academia and the workplace as well, and the diverse models that provide discussion of interesting connections between collaboration and the digital.     

CASA: A knowledge-based tool for management consultants

The objective of strategic management consultant work is a comprehensive evaluation of the ethical values of the management, the capabilities of the employees and the performance of the administrative systems in order to develop a well-suited corporate strategy. In order to fulfill all these requirements the management consultants have to take into consideration several hundred data. The human information processing capacity allows in such situations only the intuitive and condensed assessment of the strategic corporate status quo. The knowledge-based system CASA (Computer Aided Strategy Audit) assists the management consultant during the process of enterprise segmentation in order to create strategic business units, the analysis of the corporate culture, the assessment of market and competition, and the strategic cost situation. The system is used now since the CeBIT fair 1989, and includes: 5-MB code and help texts, 2000 rules in 44 knowledge bases and 200 pages of automatically generated reports and up to 100 business charts. The use of CASA reduces the costs for the management consultancy to 30% of the original costs, i.e., from $75,000 to $25,000 for a strategy development project.     

Location management techniques for mobile systems

Locating users in mobile environment is an essential problem in PCS that becomes more challenging as the network size increases and the user population grows. In third generation mobile systems, the signaling traffic and processing overhead of location updates is expected to grow tremendously leading to poor performance. Therefore location management schemes should aim at reducing the cost of updates. Yet, the lookup delay should be kept minimum. This paper aims at classifying the various approaches used for location management of mobile users by grouping them into two main categories. The first category comprises techniques that focused on reducing the cost of looking up a user and adjusted the update process accordingly. These are classified into replication, caching and selective paging techniques. The second category consists of techniques that focused on reducing the cost of updates and maneuvered the update policy to reduce the lookup cost by informing the system with the maximum possible information about user's mobility. This could be achieved by the use of statistic collection, estimation or prediction processes. We classify those schemes into three main classes: schemes based on forwarding pointers, learning-based schemes and prediction-based schemes. By investigating the technical significance of each class a new direction for future research is proposed which favors the second category of location techniques and emphasis the importance of adopting suitable learning and prediction techniques to optimize the overall location cost.     

Knowledge acquisition using hypertext

This paper addresses the issue of supporting knowledge acquisition using hypertext. We propose a way of tightly integrating hypertext and structured object representation, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) frames for the basic representation of hypertext nodes. Epistemologically, a dual view of the resulting space is of interest. One view is that of hypertext which emphasizes nodes containg g text, including formal knowledge representation. The other view focuses on objects with certain relationships, which define a semantic network. Both in hypertext and in semantic networks the relations between chunks of knowledge are explicitly represented by links. However, in today's hypertext systems a node typically contains just informal text and references to other nodes. Our approach additionally facilitates the explicit representation of structure “inside” hypertext nodes using partitions. We show the usefulness of such a tight integration for knowledge acquisition, providing several features useful for supporting it based on a level of basic hypertext functionality. In particular, we sketch a method for doing knowledge acquisition in such an environment. Hypertext is used as a mediating “semiformal” representation, which allows experts to directly represent knowledge without the immediate support of knowledge engineers. These help then to make this knowledge operational, supported by the system's facility to provide templates as well as their links to the semiformal representation. As an example of our results of using this method of knowledge acquisition, we illustrate the strategic knowledge in our application domain. More generally, our approach supports important aspects of (software) engineering knowledge-based systems and their maintenance. Also their user interface can be improved this way.