TOWARDS ENCOURAGING CONTRIBUTION TO A

SEMANTIC WIKI-BASED EXPERIENCE REPOSITORY

Alessandro dos S. Borges and Germana M. da Nóbrega

Mestrado em Gestão do Conhecimento e da Tecnologia da Informação

Universidade Católica de Brasília

SGAN 916 - Asa Norte — Brasília, DF, CEP 70.790-160, Brazil

Keywords:

Experience Factory, Semantic Wiki, incentive mechanism.

Abstract:

Recent trends on organizational context include tools allowing collaboration under a perspective of emergent

structure rather than a priori embedded one. While these new tools are suitable for promoting spontaneous

large-scale content evolution and/or communication, bringing them to companies intranets seems still a chal-

lenge. In educational settings, ﬁndings when applying mechanisms that provide awareness on community

needs improve quality and help to achieve on-time content evolution. We are currently deﬁning a mechanism

inspired both in a particular company and based on theoretical background from previous work from literature.

1 INTRODUCTION

A few years ago, within the context of Knowl-

edge Management (KM), Mark McElroy advocated

in favor of a different view of the ﬁeld to over-

come the so-called First-Generation KM (FGKM)

and its “technology-centricbrand of thinking” (McEl-

roy, 2003). For McElroy, this Second-Generation

KM (SGKM) is more inclusive of human resource

and process initiatives. Also, SGKM should privilege

knowledge construction and team work.

While a new perspective for KM was born, as

attested by that second generation knowledge man-

agement, a number of open issues from the FGKM

seemed to concern yet the community. More crit-

ically, such problems have proven as an inherited

barrier against SGKM directives. These included,

for instance, lack of commitment and motivation for

knowledge creation, sharing, and reuse, as discussed

in (Malhotra and Galletta, 2003). The authors pur-

sue an empirical study relying on theoretical basis of

commitment and motivation, as an attempt to con-

tribute for answering questions like “why do organi-

zations often struggle with incentives for knowledge

sharing for users of KM systems when sharing of

knowledge occurs without any incentive whatsoever

in several public online communities?”

An example of a successful public community is

the Wikipedia project. The underlying technologi-

cal model - the Wiki approach - is one of the com-

ponents of what Andrew McAfee has recently called

the “Enterprise 2.0 technologies” (McAfee, 2006).

As highlighted by McAfee, the design principles of

these technologies are groundedon two rules, namely,

(i) the usage facility, and (ii) the reduction of a pri-

ori structure. In the speciﬁc case of Wikipedia, an

attempt to explain content convergence and quality

seems to meet the question of incentive, assigned to

one’s desire to author, and to a somewhat democratic

community regulation. On the other hand, McAfee

points out to some challenges for companies when

bringing up these technologies to their intranets. One

of these challenges are related to how managers will

deal with control face to these “voice-givingtechnolo-

gies”. The author suggests that one delicate role for

leaders to play in this incoming scenario is to “encour-

age and stimulate use of the new tools”.

The purposes of our current work are more mod-

est than achieving an answer to those questions, but

rather, we intend to step towards the matter of en-

couraging contribution in enterprise Wiki, by provid-

ing peer-rating of contributions and rendering explicit

to employees its impact. The methodology guiding

the organization of this short paper is coherent with

the current state of the corresponding work. In the

above introduction we just presented the overall con-

text of the problem being addressed, going up to iden-

tify open issues pointed out in recent relevant man-

agement literature, out of which we draw our research

question: how to encourage employees to contribute

to a Semantic Wiki-based Experience Repository? In

section 2, we present the main pillars on which we

571

dos S. Borges A. and M. da Nóbrega G. (2008).

TOWARDS ENCOURAGING CONTRIBUTION TO A SEMANTIC WIKI-BASED EXPERIENCE REPOSITORY.

In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - AIDSS, pages 571-574

DOI: 10.5220/0001716105710574

 SciTePress

are currently building up a solution. In section 3, we

introduce the company environment being exploited

as a case study and then we describe our in-progress

solution, in terms of a compound gathering those pil-

lars. Finally, in section 4, we present our concluding

remarks.

2 FOUNDATIONS

In this section we present the main pillars, from liter-

ature, on which we are building a solution towards a

mechanism to motivate knowledge sharing in a Se-

mantic Wiki-based Experience Repository. Firstly,

from Software Engineering (and under a KM perspec-

tive), we borrow the Experience Factory approach

(Basili et al., 1994). Then, Wikis (Leuf and Cunning-

ham, 2001) are being considered for their increas-

ing use worldwide also within organizational context,

and particularly Semantic Wikis (Schaffet, 2006) for

their more expressiveness power. Finally, a mecha-

nism to encourage participation in on-line commu-

nities (Cheng and Vassileva, 2006) is being adapted

from educational context to ﬁt our purposes.

2.1 The Experience Factory

Experience Factory is an example of a knowledge

management approach for software organizations.

The Experience Factory (Basili et al., 1994) is deﬁned

as a logical and/or physical organization that supports

project developments by analyzing and synthesizing

all kinds of experience, acting as a repository for such

experience, and supplying that experience to various

projects on demand. It packages experience by build-

ing informal, formal or schematized, and productized

models and measures of various software processes,

products, and other forms of knowledge via people,

documents, and automated support. The main idea is

that organizationsneed to learn from their past experi-

ences in order to deliver products faster, cheaper, and

with higher quality than before.

The Experience Factory is supported by a

methodological approach named Quality Improve-

ment Paradigm (QIP). QIP emphasizes the continu-

ous improvement by learning from experience, at the

level of organizations. It builds on experimentation

and application of measurement. QIP consists of the

following six steps (Basili et al., 1994): (i) charac-

terize, understand the environment based on avail-

able models, data, etc.; (ii) set goals, on the basis

of the initial characterization set quantiﬁable goals

for success and improvement; (iii) choose process,

on the basis of the characterization and of the goals,

choose the appropriate process to improve; (iv) ex-

ecute, execute the process constructing the products

and providing project feedback based upon the data

on goal achievement that are being collected; (v) an-

alyze, at the end of each speciﬁc project, analyze the

data and the information gathered to evaluate the cur-

rent practices, identify problems, record ﬁndings, and

make recommendations for future projects improve-

ment; (vi) package, consolidate the experience gained

in the form of new, or updated and reﬁned, models

and other forms of structured knowledge gained from

this and prior projects, and store it in an experience

base so it is available for future projects.

A more recent approach to the Experience Factory

was proposed on the basis that it takes a relatively

long time to generate experience packages available

for the organization, since the data collected from

the projects need sophisticated analysis and synthesis

phases (Basili et al., 2001).

2.2 Semantic Wikis

Wikis are initiatives about the collective organization

of non-structured information on the Web, that are

widely used by domain experts. The ﬁrst Wiki (Wiki-

WikiWeb) was conceived by Cunningham in 1995 as

a freely expansible interconnected collection of Web

pages, a hypertext system to store and modify infor-

mation - a database, where each page is easily ed-

itable by any user that has access to a Web browser

capable of dealing with forms (Leuf and Cunning-

ham, 2001). In (Schaffet, 2006), the author points to

a variety of uses for Wiki systems, as: encyclopedia

systems like Wikipedia, coordination in software de-

velopment, project management, personal knowledge

management and collaborative editing.

The above mentioned uses of Wiki systems have

increasingly been brought to workplace, both in small

and large companies. As highlighted in (Leuf and

Cunningham, 2001), “the workplace wiki provides a

central repository allowing distributed updates for ev-

eryone [...]”. On the other hand, as the authors advise,

other applications might be more convenient when-

ever rigid format adherence is required or if security

is a concern. Success uses of Wiki in large compa-

nies are reported (e.g. in Motorola), with pros and

cons in terms of people who showed resistant to the

tool, missing features, as well as its effectiveness as a

communication tool for relatively small size group.

More recently, a case study based on Wikis in a

small size company was conducted by Chau and his

team (Chau and Maurer, 2005). Their work was re-

lated to information organization in experience repos-

itories (on software development) speciﬁcally lying

ICEIS 2008 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

572

on the Experience Factory approach. The study re-

vealed that self-organized maintenance of the reposi-

tory content among ordinary users (the ones that par-

ticipate in development activities) can be a conse-

quence of the open edition nature of Wikis.

In the direction of more expressiveness of infor-

mation represented, semantics are today being con-

sidered in several Wiki projects. A Semantic Wiki

(Schaffet, 2006) is a Wiki with augmented function-

alities based on Semantic Web technologies. Usually,

the additional knowledge is made available through

the use of formal languages, allowing inferences of

new facts based on the ones represented in the knowl-

edge model. This formal knowledge allows more ef-

ﬁcient searches compared to syntactic searches using

keywords. One of the differences between Wikis and

Semantic Wikis lies in what can be formalized. In the

case of Semantic Wikis, it is possible to create types

for pages, categories and links.

2.3 Motivating User Participation in

Online Communities

As highlighted by the authors in (Cheng and Vas-

sileva, 2006), one major problem within small on-

line communities is how to encourage individuals

to contribute. In a project named Comtella, the re-

searchers have been addressing this issue in the con-

text of under-graduating education, in which sharing

course-related digital resource is a task assigned to the

students. The researchers are concerned with regulat-

ing not only quantity but also quality of contributions

as well as to ensure a sustainable level of participa-

tion. They propose to reward speciﬁc forms of partic-

ipation according both to the community needs and to

the user’s reputation. For such, it is necessary to build

and to dynamically maintain a community model as

well as individual user models. The former allows to

inform the user what kind of contribution is needed

at the current moment. The latter allows to anticipate

user contribution by taking into account his/her previ-

ous performance. Adaptive rewards are then shown to

the user such as to help him/her to take an action. The

case studies within educational context points out to

beneﬁts the incentive mechanism brings to render sta-

ble user participation and also to prevent information

overload.

3 TOWARDS A SOLUTION

The Experience Factory (Basili et al., 1994) has

proven to be an interesting approach to knowledge

management on software development in large com-

panies. In addition, the study reported in (Chau

and Maurer, 2005) brings that approach to the con-

text of a medium-size software company by high-

lighting the gains from combining the EF to the less

structured Wiki approach. Moreover, the Comtella

project (Cheng and Vassileva, 2006) has been suc-

cessfully evolving over the last few years as an an-

swer to the problem of lack or inadequacy of con-

tributions within online communities in educational

settings. Our current research agenda includes merg-

ing those approaches while adapting them to assist the

IT department of an organization having its purpose

activity directed toward the valuation of independent

and diligent transporters from the Transport Sector in

the country. Our assumption is that the Semantic Wiki

approach - e.g., (Schaffet, 2006) - may bring signiﬁ-

cant beneﬁts to information search and retrieval to the

Wiki-based Experience Factory, while personalizing

community needs and user contributions may lead to

more qualitative and on-time content evolution.

The structure of the organization is as follows:

an Executive Department, including 2 Superintendent

Sections for 11 Coordinating Sections (Outbidding,

Human Resource, Marketing, Human Resource Ad-

vising, Accounting, Information Technology, Docu-

mentation, Legal Assessorship, Communication, and

Operational Performance). The Executive Depart-

ment is responsible for managing 160 branch ofﬁces.

Nineteen IT people work under the coordination re-

sponsible for the projects and activities related to

technology. This team is responsible for a cartel of 40

systems running on an infra-structure of 40 servers

and attending around 2600 users. The development

team includes 8 people, 3 of them being experts in

system analysis while the others are programmers.

The systems range from simple registering systems

to more complex ones, such as decision support sys-

tems.

One problem regards information exchange in-

volving the development team and the coordinations

responsible for each system. The rotation of the orga-

nization is not high, but the employees often neglect

appropriate documentation in projects, processes and

activities such as to allow reuse, or even to assist

novices. A number of other problems in a higher

knowledge management level are being identiﬁed, but

they are omitted here since the classical one just men-

tioned seems us signiﬁcant enough to call the less

structured approach we are currently working on.

Aiming to achieve the intended incentive mecha-

nism, we are currently working on the following:

• Rewarding contributions. This includes determin-

ing what activities within the Wiki are suitable

TOWARDS ENCOURAGING CONTRIBUTION TO A SEMANTIC WIKI-BASED EXPERIENCE REPOSITORY

573

and when, such as to be able to score individ-

ual contribution according to community needs,

both in terms of non-answered searches and arti-

cles waiting to be rated.

• Providing rating of peer’s contributions. This

should allow reused information to get rated by

a user according to the impact it causes in the ac-

complishment of a current project. Both the au-

thor’s and the reader’s reputation are being con-

sidered to normalize the resulting rating.

• Providing contribution awareness. Contributions

ratings should be displayed to the user, as well

as frustrated searches under the positive form of

wanted information.

4 CONCLUDING REMARKS

Our current work include deﬁning a mechanism to en-

courage contribution in a Semantic Wiki-based Expe-

rience Repository, inspired both in a particular com-

pany and based on theoretical background. Future

work is foreseen for implementing and testing it into

the company.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The work reported in this paper is under develop-

ment within the engageGrid project, which is sup-

ported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento

Cientíﬁco e Tecnológico - CNPq (Brazil), under the

grant MCT/CNPq 15/2007 - Universal - Proc. no.

481602/2007-0.

The authors are grateful to Serviço Social do

Transporte - SEST/SENAT (Brazil) for rendering

available substantial data relevant to develop the work

reported in this paper, and also for partially support-

ing their participation at ICEIS 2008.

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