Journal of Information & Knowledge Management

The promise of increased organizational performance has brought about a high level of interest for knowledge management (KM). Organizations and Governments are also actively launching KM projects to meet increasing needs of high quality and responsiveness. This interest has contributed to the development of various aspects of KM, but has also underscored a lack of effective methods, as evidenced by the sheer number of proposed approaches, along with a lingering scepticism about their relevance in practice. In this article, we argue for the necessity for a more global and high level analysis for orienting KM strategic planning and propose different steps to go about it. We used an action research approach in the context of Quebec's efforts in planning a global and integrated KM strategy for managing its water related knowledge. This research project shows that the proposed auditing approach provided a useful guide to identify critical issues and projects in KM planning, particularly in a complex and large-scale governmental environment.

The concept of Personal Knowledge and Information Management (PKIM) is based, among others, on two theories: Personal Information Management (PTM) and Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), which hitherto were both subjects of separate studies. Moreover, the concept of PKIM is related to IL, which is a concept of information skills and competences of individuals — a person who manages knowledge has to be information literate. Some of the empirical studies results in the field of PKIM, started in Poland and recently continued in Germany, are presented. As the research method an unstructured questionnaire with open questions was used.

Given the results of the survey as well as taking into account the subject literature, the concepts of PIM, PKM, and Information Literacy (IL) seem to be compatible and connected with each other. Our respondents perceive Knowledge and Information as well as knowledge management (KM) and information management (IM) in the context of learning and studying as integrated areas of interests. Although they do see differences between them, interconnections and relations seem more important. Furthermore, KM and IM are recognized as tools of coping with information overload. All aspects that have repercussions on KM and IM are related to three categories: personal characteristics, environment (macro and micro environment), and knowledge and information sources.

In this paper, a framework to facilitate development of knowledge management (KM) system for curriculum development process is suggested. It was validated through experts' opinions with thirty two experts. The components of the framework were supported by the experts by emphasizing their necessity and importance in the curriculum development process. Some model curricula and related guidelines were studied to identify components of good curriculum. The curriculum development process was studied through various models for curriculum development proposed by researchers and description of the process by researchers. By the analysis of these models and processes, the Phases in curriculum development process life cycle were identified. Use of knowledge management in business organizations and other disciplines was also studied. Based on all this, this researcher could identify components of a good KM system for curriculum development. This framework will help in implementing a KM system for curriculum development process. It will streamline the process, improve quality of curriculum, save time and efforts by using existing knowledge and avoid repetition of work.

The introduction of information and communication technology (ICT) has altered the service delivery around the world by making it more accessible and cost effective across e-service markets. In a country like India the problem of health is an enormous one where a majority of poor are outside the effective medical network. In order to address these problems many information and technology (IT) oriented new ventures have been established to eliminate the gap in health inequity by creating network of hospitals exclusively in non-urban areas. Despite of huge popularity of these services, identifying the quality of such services need careful attention. Exhaustive review of literature highlights that there exists little understanding for such a study in IT enabled Indian healthcare domain in context to new ventures/start-ups with an emergence of a gap. With the increasing rise of technology enabled new healthcare ventures there have been high rates of failure too due to lack of providing quality service, so it has become imperative to prioritize the contextual and sectoral specific settings of service quality issues as it is being felt increasingly that it is the quality that would ultimately decide the value of services. This paper thus attempts to prioritize the context specific service quality dimensions in IT enabled scalable healthcare ventures from Indian context with focus in non-urban regions by deploying technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) methodology as multi-criteria decision making technique. Further this paper proposed a conceptual model as conjectural understanding of the antecedents to the start-ups and as a guide that can provides new entrepreneurial insights to the service managers who can better apportion their resource in order to build quality and scalability.

Multilingual knowledge sharing imposes new requirements on knowledge management systems so as to present digital knowledge resources in multiple languages. Knowledge sharing is degraded by inconsistencies such as contents omitted or altered in one of the languages. To resolve this issue, we present a mechanism for detecting inconsistencies in multilingual knowledge sharing. A state transition model is proposed to define the states of the multilingual contents, the set of actions, and the set of transition functions. Inconsistency detection rules are designed to represent the states of the multilingual contents and thus permit the identification of inconsistencies in knowledge sharing. The analysis of a multilingual Wikipedia article indicates that inconsistencies are present in multilingual contents generated by collaboration. In experiments, the proposed mechanism is applied to a test set of revision histories of multilingual articles; the outcome shows satisfactory results with an average precision of 88% in detecting inconsistencies and a recall of 86%. While the proposal considers only user edit actions, it can detect inconsistencies which will be useful in allowing Natural Language Processing (NLP) based systems to synchronize multilingual contents in an early phase.

The case study describes how the team members of a Tunisian Environmental Scanning Agriculture Observatory dealt with new ways of communicating introduced by technology. An inter-organizational computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) platform was implemented within the agriculture observatory to ameliorate the communication of information and knowledge between the stakeholders. Our study aims to determine what contextual conditions could impede the adoption of the new ways of communicating and sharing knowledge. A diagnostic tool was designed and used to assess the impact of culture, structure and top management attitude, as contextual conditions, on the achievement of the collaborative environmental scanning and knowledge exchange activity. To understand the dynamic between these variables and their interplay during the implementation phases of the CSCW, we conducted a longitudinal study. The results could assist managers at the organizational level; indeed they will be able to avoid failures and to better support the process of organizational change.

Explosive growth of information in the Internet has raised threats for individual privacy. k-Anonymity and l-diversity are two known techniques proposed to address the threats. They use concept hierarchy tree (CHT)-based generalization/suppression. For a given attribute several CHTs can be constructed. An appropriate CHT is to be chosen for attribute anonymization to be effective. This paper discusses an on the fly approach for constructing CHT which can be used for generalization/suppression. Furthermore to improve anonymization the CHT can be dynamically adjusted for a given k value. Performance evaluation is done for the proposed approach and a comparative study is performed against known methods, k-member clustering anonymization and mondrian multi-dimensional algorithm using (1) improved on the fly hierarchy (IOTF) (Campan et al., 2011), (2) on the fly hierarchy (OTF) (Campan and Cooper, 2010), (3) hierarchy free (HF) (LeFevre et al., 2006), (4) predefined hierarchy (PH) (Iyengar, 2002) (5) CHU (Chu and Chiang, 1994) and (6) HAN (Han and Fu, 1994) methods. The metrics used for evaluation are (a) information loss, (b) discernibility metric, (c) normalized average equivalence size metric. Experimental results indicate that our approach is more effective and flexible and the utility is 12% better than IOTF, 16% better than OTF and CHU, 17% better than PH and 21% better than HAN methods when applied on mondrain multi-dimensional algorithm. Experiments are conducted on k-member clustering technique and it is observed that our approach improved utility 1% better than IOTF, 2% better than OTF, 3% better than CHU, 5% better than PH and 14% better than HAN methods.

Text summarization is one of the most discussed topic in the field in information exchange and retrieval. Recently, the need for local language based text summarization methods are increasing. In this paper, a method for text summarization in Hindi language is plotted with help of extraction methods. The proposed approach is uses three major algorithms, fuzzy classifier, neural network and global search optimization (GSO). The fuzzy classifier and neural network are used for generating sentence score. The GSO algorithm is used with the neural network, in order to optimize the weights in the neural network. A hybrid score is generated from fuzzy method and neural network for each input sentences. Finally, based on the hybrid score from fuzzy classifier and neural network, the summary of the given input records are generated. An experimental analysis of the proposed approach will subjected based on the evaluation parameters precision, recall. Later on experimental analysis are conducted on the proposed approach in order to evaluate the performance. According to the experimental analysis, the proposed approach achieved an average precision rate 0.90 and average recall rate of 0.88 for compression rate 20%. The comparative analysis also provided reasonable results to prove the efficiency of the proposed approach.

Knowledge sharing is deemed to be important for organisation as it helps to bring much benefits to the organisation, such as enhancing one's creativity. Knowledge sharing behaviour (KSB) is highly subjective and it depends on one's willingness to participate in such behaviour. Prior research has indicated that a person's emotional intelligence (EI) affects one's ability to share their knowledge and through knowledge sharing it helps to increase creativity in workplace. Despite such claims had been made by researchers, yet there is very little empirical examination has been conducted to examine the link between EI and perceived creativity through KSB. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of KSB as a mediator between EI and creativity. A survey was conducted and obtained a total of 176 valid respondents from 20 MNCs in Klang Valley. Multiple linear regression analyses were used to analyse the hypotheses. The results indicate that KSB mediates the relationship between EI and creativity. The results also indicate that EI plays an important role in influencing one's willingness to share his or her knowledge.