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The information professions need a paradigmatic shift to address the epistemicide happening within our field and the ways we have systematically undermined knowledge systems falling outside of Western traditions. Epistemicide is the killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a knowledge system. We argue epistemicide happens when epistemic injustices are persistent and systematic and collectively work as a structured and systemic oppression of particular ways of knowing. We present epistemicide as a conceptual approach for understanding and analyzing ways knowledge systems are silenced or devalued within Information Science. We extend Fricker's framework by: (a) identifying new types of epistemic injustices, and (b) by adding to Fricker's concepts of Primary and Secondary Harm and introducing the concept of a Third Harm happening at an intergenerational level. Addressing epistemicide is critical for information professionals because we task ourselves with handling knowledge from every field. Acknowledgement of and taking steps to interrupt epistemic injustices and these specific harms are supportive of the social justice movements already happening. This paper serves as an interruption of epistemic injustice by presenting actions toward justice in the form of operationalized interventions of epistemicide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between external knowledge sourcing and a diverse set of innovation outcomes in rural and urban establishments in the U.S. Existing studies in the broader knowledge management literature principally examine firms in a single industry, overwhelmingly rely on patent data to proxy for innovation, and cannot account for the innovations of businesses in rural American markets. By addressing these limitations using data from the 2014 Rural Establishment Innovation Survey of the USDA's Economic Research Service, this research provides novel insights into how externally acquired knowledge by American establishments may support innovation. Results of the analysis suggest that external knowledge sourcing may specifically promote product, process, and green innovation in U.S. firms. While collective results when external sources of information are divided by industry orientation fail to show that sources outside of a firm's industry play a dominant role in the innovation processes of American establishments in general, findings provide evidence for an outsized impact of these relationships within rural establishments specifically and suggest that external knowledge sourcing from extra‐industry organizations is most critical for promoting successful innovation in rural firms. Results additionally indicate that knowledge sourcing from non‐local organizations may be more important for supporting innovation in rural compared to urban markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a new efficient feature extraction method is proposed to handle the one-step-ahead daily maximum load forecasting. In recent years, power systems become more complicated under the deregulated and competitive environment. As a result, it is not easy to understand the cause and effect of short-term load forecasting with a bunch of data. This paper analyzes load data from the standpoint of data mining. By it we mean a technique that finds out rules or knowledge through large database. As a data mining method for load forecasting, this paper focuses on the regression tree that handles continuous variables and expresses a knowledge rule as if-then rules. Investigating the variable importance of the regression tree gives information on the transition of the load forecasting models. This paper proposes a feature extraction method for examining the variable importance. The proposed method allows to classify the transition of the variable importance through actual data. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 156(2): 43–51, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.20104 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper deals with the problem of an assessment of symptoms in medical diagnosis. A unified interpretation of symptoms is necessary to estimate their significance in a diagnosis. Yet, even if they are properly defined, different evaluations of them based on experts' knowledge or statistical estimation are possible. The present study aims at combining evaluations that may originate from an expert or can be found from statistical features of the data, as well as those determined for ‘easy’ and ‘difficult’ diagnostic cases. A model of diagnostic inference is proposed in the framework of the Dempster–Shafer theory extended for fuzzy focal elements. The basic probability assignment defined in this theory estimates weights of symptoms. Two basic probability assignments can be created and then combined. In this way weights of symptoms represent knowledge common for two kinds of data or obtained from an expert and from data. Thus, a combination of heuristics and data mining results becomes possible. An algorithm of the basic probability assignment calculation is suggested and tested for medical data: a database from the internet and individually gathered data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improving health care delivery is a pressing societal goal, and information scientists have a role in effecting change. Information science research has led to understanding theories and practices of information use within the informing professions, but information science and one of its subspecialties, Knowledge Management (KM), also have the potential to influence and enhance other professional disciplines. This concept paper makes the argument that KM is a beneficial framework to help health care clinicians manage their practices and ultimately administer quality care to their patients. The central argument is predicated on the assumption that medicine is a knowledge-based profession and that finding, sharing, and developing clinicians' knowledge is necessary for effective primary health care practice. The authors make the case that in an environment of a burgeoning body of health care research and the adoption of technology tools, physicians can benefit from understanding effective KM practice. The model as presented here borrows from recent information science scholarship in KM and is intended to inform intervention protocols for effective KM to improve quality of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Disabilities Information Flow (DIF) project at the University of St Andrews has sought to provide a means of efficiently managing all student disabilities information within the institution and provide appropriate role-based service interfaces for all staff who need to routinely interact with this information. This paper describes the software engineering processes used for the context analysis, design and implementation of the DIF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors propose a technique for generating creative conversations between users and multiple agents to support knowledge creation in a community. First, they describe self-expressing alter-ego agents as user proxies. An alter-ego agent accumulates statements that were originated by the user in past conversations as self-expressions and converses with other alter-ego agents by outputting these again in a manner adapted to the circumstances. Next, the authors describe the EgoChat system, which is an environment for conversations between alter-ego agents and users, and a framework for supporting knowledge creation by using EgoChat. Finally, they examine and discuss methods of evaluating this technique based on conversation examples using EgoChat. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 88(11): 56–65, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.20201 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advance of Internet and Web technologies has boosted the development of electronic commerce. More and more people have changed their traditional trading behaviors and started to conduct Internet shopping. However, the exponentially increasing product information provided by Internet enterprises causes the problem of information overload, and this inevitably reduces the customer's satisfaction and loyalty. To overcome this problem, in this paper we propose a multi-agent system that is capable of eliciting expert knowledge and of recommending optimal products for individual consumers. The recommendations are based on both product knowledge from domain experts and the customer's preferences from system–consumer interactions. In addition, the system also uses behavior patterns collected from previous consumers to predict what the current consumer may expect. Experiments have been conducted and the results show that our system can give sensible recommendations, and it is able to adapt to the most up-to-date preferences for the customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's competitive environment, rapid advances in economic globalization and information technology have forced many organizations to anticipate and respond to increasing volatility and competitive pressures. Numerous researches have focused on developing techniques on the analysis, design and management of whole logistics chains in particular in the domain of data mining, data analysis and data classification. While the data mining techniques and computational intelligence techniques are good independently for solving specific tasks, they can be synergized through the formation of an integrated and unified model, which can take advantage of the goods and offset the flaws of the two techniques. In this paper, an intelligent information infrastructure, which is characterized by its ability to encompass a rich collection of knowledge representation formalisms for dealing with a logistics information flow problem, is presented. Such intelligent information infrastructure includes a two-step strategy that embraces the combination of online analytical processing and neural networks to support knowledge discovery. In addition, extensible markup language is used to support the overall infrastructure, in order to facilitate the seamless data interchange within an enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the recent developments in managing electronic resources in libraries. Accordingly, the demand for electronic resources calls for a more integrated solution because managing and storing information in spreadsheets and paper files becomes more difficult. In response to it, several libraries developed their own electronic resource management systems including the Digital Library Federation's Electronic Resources Management Initiative, an initiative group composed of librarians directed by Tim Jewell from the University of Washington. Together, they began to develop common tools for managing the license agreements including a set of functional requirements, an entity-relationship diagram and data element dictionary.

The article offers information related to the reports on Graduate Information Programs and Accreditation by the Information professionals Task Force of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) in the U.S. It states that the reports reviews the status of information professional programs and related accreditation activities. The report further include the news from New England ASIS&T chapter (NEASIS&T) and news from Special Interest Group/Social informatics (SIG/SI). In addition, the reports contains an announcement from Special Interest Group/Intentional Information Issues (SIG/III) related to the winners of the 2008 SIG/III International Paper Context.

The article provides an overview of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) bulletin special section. It is noted that this international section is dedicated to Susan O'Neil Johnson who has enormous contribution to ASIS&T's efforts in reaching out librarians and information professionals. She helped institutionalize the InfoShare Program of Special Interest Group/International Information Issues (SIG/III). She is the co-founder of the SIG/III International Paper Contest and worked to initiate its travel grant program. This section also includes visions from a globalized society, ASIS&T International Relations Committee Report, Survey of European Information Scientists and Global Information Resources.