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International audience; We study the problem of aggregating metadata about the validity and/or completeness, with respect to given topics, of information provided by multiple sources. For a given topic, the validity level reflects the certainty that the information stored is true. The completeness level of a source on a given topic reflects the certainty that a piece of information that is not stored is false. We propose a modeling based on possibility theory which allows the fusion of such multi-source information into a graded belief base.

The LP structures theory contains a lattice-based algebraic approach for modeling and researching a wide range of production and similar systems in computer science. The article studies an algebraic model (LP structure) which has a number of significant capabilities that cover distributed knowledge systems. The authors formulate some results that create a theoretical basis for optimizing distributed knowledge management. The paper considers a production logical equations class, which opens up new possibilities for accelerating distributed backward logical inference.

This paper describes a framework for implementing distributed ontology-based knowledge management systems (DOKMS). The framework, in particular, focuses on knowledge management within organizations. It investigates the functional requirements to enable Individual Knowledge Workers (IKWs) and distributed communities (e.g., project teams) to create, manage and share knowledge with the support of ontologies. On the one hand, the framework enables distributed and collaborative work by relying on a P2P virtual office model. On the other hand, it provides a multi-layer ontology framework to enable semantics-driven knowledge processing. The ontology framework allows organizational knowledge to be modeled at different levels. An Upper Ontology is exploited to establish a common organizational knowledge background. A set of Workspace Ontologies can be designed to manage, share and search knowledge within communities by the establishment of a contextual (i.e., related to the aim of a group) understanding. Finally, Personal Ontologies support IKWs in personal knowledge management activities. We present an implementation of the designed framework in the K-link+ system and show the suitability of this approach through a use case. The evaluation of K-link+ in a real network is also discussed.

The trends and recent changes in logistics lead to complex and partially conflicting requirements on logistic planning and control systems. Due to the lack of efficiency of currently available strategies and methodologies, a new paradigm for logistics planning and control is required. An emerging approach is the analysis and design of autonomous logistic processes. Agents represent a modern approach for implementing autonomous systems. The challenge for the design of agent systems is to integrate the complex and dynamic knowledge required for reliable decision-making in logistics. To address this problem, we introduce a framework for distributed knowledge management in competitive environments. Our approach combines a general role model enabling distributed, flexible agent-based knowledge management services and a set of general decision parameters for rational agents.

Knowledge and Information Management can often be applied successfully only, if it allows for a certain degree of heterogeneity and organizational distribution. Distributed Knowledge and Information Management enable loosely coupled collaboration in heterogeneous domains by intelligent automatic mediation. One major obstacle in the development of such mediation methods is systematic evaluation. This work presents an approach to evaluate intelligent mediation techniques for Distributed Knowledge and Information Management using agent-based modeling and simulation. On the one hand, the proposed model can be used to gain insight into the problems that heterogeneity poses on such mediation methods. On the other hand, it can be used to predict the performance of a system, before actually introducing it in an organization. The framework is instantiated for two different tasks. Firstly, it is applied to the problem of collaborative filtering, a relatively well studied approach to mediate ratings among heterogeneous users and user groups. This area serves as a test-bed for the simulation framework and is used to analyze some prototypical problems faced in many Distributed Information and Knowledge Management systems. In a second instantiation, the model is applied to the problem of matching concepts in different ontologies.

This paper presents a systematic approach to development of a methodology and a system framework for knowledge management to support allied system engineering. The approach of this research has laid-down four phases: allied system engineering characterization, knowledge identification, analysis and modeling, KM strategy and methodology development, and system development. The methodology consists of a rationale behind the methodology, a life cycle model for knowledge management, and a distributed knowledge management framework. Based on the proposed methodology, a knowledge management system framework is developed using component technology. Besides providing functions for knowledge management and sharing, the system possesses properties to meet the hierarchical, distributed, flexible and dynamic-configurable characteristics of allied system engineering.

Knowledge management has inspired a shift from a transaction to a distributed knowledge management (DKM) perspective on inter-organizational information processing. The DKM concept structures the knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, and knowledge exploitation in organizations according to a product state model (PSM) required for management of technological diversity. Each player in the network acquires specific knowledge from other players for decision support. This article shows the relevance of the DKM model in a case study of a distributed decision support system (DDSS) in health care administration in the US.

International audience; In the global competition, companies are propelled by an immense pressure to innovate. The trend to produce more new knowledge-intensive products or services and the rapid progress of information technologies arouse huge interest on knowledge management for innovation. However the strategy of knowledge management is not widely adopted for innovation in industries due to a lack of an effective approach of their integration. This study aims to help the designers to innovate more efficiently based on an integrated approach of knowledge management. Based on this integrated approach, a prototype of distributed knowledge management system for innovation is developed. An industrial application is presented and its initial results indicate the applicability of the approach and the prototype in practice.

Offshore software development (OSD) is a leading business sector in the global IT marketplace, and vendors in different countries are opening software development centres to take advantage of new business opportunities. However, software development is both a technical and a social process in which various software modules are integrated, requiring ongoing interaction and synchronisation of activities between distributed stakeholders. Knowledge management (KM) strategies are applied to create knowledge consistent with client requirements, project specific features and chosen design methodologies. Building on existing KM theories with empirical evidence from ten case studies in the Asia Pacific region, within two country contexts (New Zealand and India), this research reveals the KM initiatives for enabling knowledge transfer in the OSD process at the operational, design and strategic level. The paper offers insights on how software vendors build organisational knowledge repositories as they streamline distributed tasks in different country contexts. Country-specific contexts reveal that New Zealand vendors are engaged more in project and product management and have further outsourced software development tasks to other low cost countries. The Indian vendors are involved in software construction, development of technical specialist skills and use of more formal processes. These findings emphasise implications of various sociological, cultural and technical perspectives of KM initiatives in OSD.

In dynamic markets (characterized by the specialization of work, outsourcing processes, just-in-time and distributed productions, etc.), firms have moved from hierarchical structures to networked models. These are based on both intraorganizational networks among strategic units, divisions, groups, and so on; and interorganizational networks, such as industrial districts and knowledge networks (Hamel & Prahalad, 1990). Production is based on the coordination of a constellation of units, some of which are part of the organization (administration, R&D [research and development], etc.), and others refer to different companies (such as specialized outsourcing production, logistics, etc.). All these units might not totally be controlled by a unique subject, and might grow and differentiate their activities in an autonomous way, coexisting as in a biofunctional system (Maturana & Varela, 1980) and creating unexpected combinations of processes and products (Chandler, 1962).

In the past two decades, the widespread application of Information Technology (IT) has resulted in majority of organizational activities being automated and computerized. In order to solve business problems, gain competitive advantage and sustain organizational improvement, organizations have been investing heavily in IT and business information systems development. Consequently, the complexity of business systems has created an infinite number of technical and functional problems. This complexity also means that users are not able to work at optimal productivity when they encounter technical problems related to the system. Organization may face potential loss in income, whether direct or indirect, immediate or in the future. Help Desks (HD) were established to provide technical support to users when they encounter technical problems related to hardware, software, application programs and network connections.

At the beginning of the decade, the Agent Mediated Knowledge Management workshops series as well as Bonifacio’s theoretical approach layed the foundations of a new eld of distributed knowledge management based upon the agent paradigm. The agent based approach enables key features for knowledge management. The local management of knowledge by agents allows to go beyond the limitations of centralized knowledge management. Thus, knowledge can be maintained in each agent at a coarse-grained level, with different representations. In the mean time the rise of the semantic web technologies enables a new range of possibilities for agents dedicated to knowledge management. In this chapter we investigate the integration of semantic web technologies into an agent architecture that allows agents to represent their knowledge and their behavior in a semantic manner. We present the semantic agent model, its implementation and we discuss the perpectives open by semantic agents.

Communities of practices (CoPs) bring high value to product and process innovation in the actual context of economic depression and enable the development of small and medium enterprises. We aim to contribute to the improvement of their value promoting an integrated model based on vSa and DKMF models finalized to promote the knowledge transfer among community members of cooperating CoPs. The model enables to generate new knowledge and to amplify innovative cooperation when the governance effort in planning community development finds an equilibrium with structural characteristic of meta-CoP emerging from cooperating CoPs. The model is expected to help with needs of next organization scenario: big projects collecting activities shared between many actors and emerging complex social systems based on networking.

This chapter introduces and reviews the concept of distributed knowledge management within the Healthcare environment and between Healthcare and other partner organisations. As management should not be mistaken for control, distributed should not be identified with multicentered. Trade-offs between managerial centralism and social contextuality should be allowed. Although the core issues in knowledge management are not technological, tools that can support the central versus social dualism of knowledge management are critical to the effective and appropriate use of generated knowledge. Information tools can significantly affect the user experience and local social wiliness to participation and enhance the managerial trends that make use of knowledge networks and shared logistics. They include service-oriented architectures (SOA), artificial intelligence networks (AIN), multiple agent systems (MAS) and the contextual tools of Web 2.0. All of those tools feed their functionality on the semantic detail, the granularity and the trust levels enjoyed by their information sources.

In recent years, organisations are blurring their boundaries interacting with other organisations. This process fostered new business paradigms and organisational forms that transcend the previous static and closed competitive models and move to flexible and collaborative ways of working. Examples of new models are the extended enterprise (EE) and virtual enterprise (VE). For promoting those new organisational models are required adequate technologies enabling collaboration, integration and exchanging of information across heterogeneous and distributed sources. Moreover, in such environments, another important aspect to deal with is related to the 'quality' of information and knowledge exchanged. For fulfilling those requirements, we argue that a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture implementing the 'virtual office' paradigm combined with adequate semantic supports can be an effective solution. This paper presents K-link+, a P2P system implemented in JXTA based on the concepts of 'community of business', 'virtual office' and 'ontologies'.

Peer-to-Peer architectures for content and knowledge management foster the creation of communities of workers in which effective knowledge and information sharing takes place. In such communities, workers have similar capabilities in providing other workers with data and/or services and are autonomous in managing their own knowledge objects. Since objects are typically shared among a set of workers, problems regarding concurrent access to content, content consistency and synchronization of peers arise. This paper describes a hybrid architecture for the management of data consistency and peer synchronization. The designed framework combines centralized, yet dynamic, mechanisms for metadata management and peer-to-peer mechanisms for data transfer. The paper reports on the use of these mechanisms in K-link+ a P2P collaborative platform, developed at the GridLab of the University of Calabria, for distributed knowledge management. An analytical study founded on queue network theory confirms the efficiency of the presented approach.

A framework to capture and manage distributed knowledge can address distributed knowledge management from creation to facilitation. Knowledge generation and dissipation needs to be embedded in corporate processes. These processes need to have an underlying principle that eliminates the obstacles of collecting multiple knowledge perspectives within complex organizations. Moreover, extrinsic motivators, social-psychological forces, and organizational climate factors are believed to influence knowledge sharing. This study discusses a framework that provides a synergized view to collect, share, and manage distributed corporate knowledge using organizational knowledge models and technology knowledge models. Structural, cognitive, relational, and technological factors derived from a synthesized literature review aid to formulate this framework. Using this framework, the role of peer-to-peer networks on distributed knowledge management in organizations is examined.

Logistic processes are inherently dynamic and hence require the ability to plan and re-plan in complex situations, under rigid time constraints, and in light of uncertain, incomplete, and false information. Standard scenarios of logistic processes typically have been modeled on the basis of static graph-theoretic representations. The well-known traveling salesman problem (TSP), the vehicle routing problem (VRP), or the pickup and delivery problem (PDP) reduce the complex task of transportation to a route optimization problem. They neglect both the important role of knowledge and communication in real-world logistic processes (cf. (Hult et al. 2003)) and the fact that relevant parameters, e.g., traffic flow, incoming orders, etc. change over time.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures for content and knowledge management enable autonomous peers to interoperate in a decentralized and distributed fashion for fulfilling individual and/or common goals. These architectures foster the creation of communities of Individual Knowledge Workers (IKWs) in which effective knowledge and information sharing takes place. In such communities, IKWs have similar capabilities in providing other IKWs with data and/or services and are autonomous in managing their own knowledge objects. Since such objects are typically shared among a set of IKWs, problems regarding concurrent access to content, content consistency and synchronization arise. This paper proposes a decentralized approach to the aforementioned issues and reports on its application and performance evaluation in the K-link+ system. K-link+ is a P2P collaborative platform, developed at the GridLab of the University of Calabria, for distributed knowledge management based on the Virtual Office model.

While Knowledge Management solutions designed for the traditional organization achieve knowledge transfer by establishing central repositories of information and global procedures for knowledge flow, Distributed Knowledge Management aims to support the local processes of knowledge creation and puts the emphasis on limited, ad-hoc co-operations based on shared goals instead of global control. Peer-to-peer architectures offer an ideal technological match for the theory of DKM and may be the only choice in many practical cases, e.g. when dealing with personal knowledge that needs to be controlled locally. In the following we present the case for DKM and the methodology that was used in the SWAP project to develop and deploy the P2P applications described elsewhere in this book.

Pervasive environments are mostly based on the ad hoc networking paradigm and are characterized by ubiquity in both users and devices and artefacts. In these inherently unstable conditions and bearing in mind the resources limitations that are attributed to participating devices, the deployment of knowledge management techniques is considered complicated due to the particular requirements. This paper addresses the issue of secure and distributed knowledge management applications in pervasive environments. We present a prototype implementation after having presented detailed design principles as far as the communications and the application itself is regarded. Robustness and lightweight implementation are the cornerstones of the proposed solution.

The paper addresses the electronic commerce application field of Health Care Administration. Models for knowledge distribution is a rare commodity in the Health Care Administration. Distributed Knowledge Management (DKM) is a concept that originated as an abstraction of a business model prepared for the mechanical and agricultural industry but holds promises for a more general use. The contribution of this paper is to suggest a new business model based on DKM and show the relevance and applicability of this concept in a totally new context of the Health Care Administration.

The die- and mold-making industry can be characterized by small and medium enterprises (SMEs), sophisticated technologies, and highly skilled employees who have to cooperate in order to fulfill orders of customers with which they are engaged in an intensive process of knowledge exchange. The knowledge-intensive production process of die and mold makers consequently requires an integrated organizational and technical solution to support the sharing of documented knowledge as well as collaboration. Standard knowledge management systems (KMS) primarily target the organization-internal processes and documented knowledge of large organizations. Know-CoM intends to overcome the limitations of these solutions and explicitly targets SMEs as well as knowledge processes that cross organizational boundaries. Know-CoM is a European Commission-funded CRAFT project that provides an advanced concept of decentralized management of access privileges to personal, protected, and public knowledge spaces. An easy-to-use solution supports the capturing of experiences. A joint knowledge structure brokers context across organizational boundaries and eases discovery of knowledge and experts. Finally, a knowledge management certification technique allows for a coordinated reuse of knowledge that is integrated with the daily work practices of die and mold makers.

In many organisations, conservation of specialised expertise is picked out as a central theme only after experienced members have already left. The paper presents the SELaKT method, a method for Sustainable Expert Localisation and Knowledge T ransfer based on social network analysis (SNA). It has been developed during a project co-operation between the Department of Information Science at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Free University Berlin, and the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology IPK, Berlin. The SELaKT method uses recent insights into network analysis and pragmatically adapts SNA to suit organisational practice. Thus it provides a strategic tool to localise experts, to identify knowledge communities and to analyse the structure of knowledge flows within and between organisations. The SELaKT method shows its advances and increasing relevance for practical use by integration of specific organisational conditions and requirements into the process of analysis.

Current knowledge management (KM) systems tend to presuppose a centralized approach to managing knowledge, assuming a single classification schema or ontology. In reality, organizations consist of many autonomous individuals and units cooperating and competing to pursue private as well as common goals. Knowledge needs exist from local perspectives as well as across different perspectives.

In our work a new approach, the Distributed Knowledge Management (DKM) approach, is used and organizations are seen as constellations of communities, which "own" local knowledge and exchange it through meaning negotiation coordina_ tion processes. In order to reify communities within a DKM system, the concept of Knowledge Node (KN) is used and then applied in a case study: a complex Italian national firm, the Impresa Pizzarotti [and] C. S.p.A. All communities of practices are un_ veiled and reified as KNs within a high level architecture of a DKM system. In this paper it is argued that, even if knowledge has to be organized and made useful to the whole organization, there are types of knowledge that must be managed in an autonomous way, and the DKM approach is a good system to deal with coordination/negotiation processes.

The goal of this article is to explore some of the main reasons that sustain a distributed approach to Knowledge Management, and this will be done, first, showing how, according to very different theoretical disciplines, knowledge diversity is proposed as the very source of organizational innovation and adaptability, second providing some evidence coming from major applicative domains, third proposing some considerations on the role of technology.

International audience; We describe the technical choices and the design of a multi-agents software architecture to manage a corporate memory in the form of a corporate semantic web. We then present our approach to tackle a distributed memory and distributed queries.

The paper addresses the electronic commerce application field of Health Care Administration. Models for knowledge distribution is a rare commodity in the Health Care Administration. Distributed Knowledge Management (DKM) is a concept that originated as an abstraction of a business model prepared for the mechanical and agricultural industry but holds promises for a more general use. The contribution of this paper is to suggest a new business model based on DKM and show the relevance and applicability of this concept in a totally new context of the Health Care Administration.

Knowledge management has inspired a shift from a transaction to a distributed knowledge management (DKM) perspective on interorganizational information processing. The DKM concept structures the knowledge creation, knowledge sharing and knowledge exploitation in organizations according to a product state model (PSM) required for management of technological diversity. Each player in the network acquires specific knowledge from other players for decision support. This article shows the relevance of the DKM model in a case study of a distributed decision support system (DDSS) in heath care administration in the US.

The increasing product complexity and the continuous need of improving product quality and services force companies to join into distributed and extended networks. Collaborative product development triggers research toward the development of new methods and tools to manage virtual teamwork to reduce time to market. In this context, the paper proposes a novel approach and a supporting co-design platform to manage interrelations across organisations. Experimentations into four product design chains show improvements in communication, information sharing, knowledge distribution, time saving and easiness of team management. They demonstrate that collaborative product development can be usefully enhanced only if tools and procedures are designed for the specific needs of the virtual network.