clear that having more prepared and experienced
teams will result in higher chances of winning a
project but the individuals who make up these teams
often rely on tacit, subjective knowledge gained
through personal experience. Therefore by capturing
different steps and results in their work process
assuring knowledge articulation, collaboration and
sharing we can help others become more effective.
4 WORKSPACE DESIGN
To address the issues in this case study around
informal processes and to increase productivity of
knowledge workers two kinds of support tools are
being developed: 1) helping knowledge workers find
the right information given their current context and
task and 2) helping large project teams work
collaboratively, supporting knowledge articulation
and sharing. The first class of tools considers usage
of information technologies mainly relying on
Information Retrieval and Knowledge Discovery
techniques for knowledge management. In this paper
we aim to address the second challenge and help
large teams work collaboratively while trying to
capture informal tacit knowledge. The goal is to
achieve this without introducing considerable
overhead to the knowledge worker.
4.1 Semantic Wikis
In (Schaffert et al., 2006) the authors described
semantic wikis as solutions merging social software
assuring choice of processes and supporting
collaboration with Semantic Technologies enabling
structuring information for easy retrieval, reuse and
exchange between different tools. With this in mind
there have been a number of structured wiki projects
both as research efforts and in the last years as
commercial solutions: Semantic Media Wiki (SMW)
(Krötzsch et al., 2006.), IkeWiki (Schaffert, 2006),
SemperWiki (Oren, 2005), TikiWiki
1
with
Semantics Links extension, Confluence with
Wikidsmart
2
, 2010), SMW+ Semantic Enterprise
Wiki
3
. On one side traditional wikis enable features
as: editing in a browser, use of wiki syntax, rollback
mechanisms with versioned pages, strong linking
between wiki pages and collaborative editing. On
the other side, semantic wikis enable machine
1
http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Semantic
2
http://www.zagile.com/products/wikidsmart.html
3
http://wiki.ontoprise.de/smwforum/index.php/Main_Page
readable representation of underlying wiki
structures, by allowing annotation of links between
pages e.g. through giving them certain types
(Schaffert et al., 2006). Link annotation enables:
enriched content by displaying context relevant
information based on the semantic annotation (e.g.
pages regarding a company can be enriched by a list
of alliance companies); semantic navigation
through enabling additional information regarding
what each link is describing (e.g. Company page can
have links hasEmpoyees, isLocated and wasFounded
displayed for navigation etc.). Semantic search
enables searching for related concept instances using
the underlying knowledge base (e.g. Company x
hasClient would list all annotated clients of a certain
company). Reasoning offers inference of implicit
information by using the wiki knowledge base as
well as external sources.
4.2 Informal Processes
We start from the intuition that tacit informal
knowledge of an employee is learned through years
of experience. We consider two main issues: 1) How
to better capture different steps (or results) of
different tasks so that employees referring to the
central repository have more information and 2)
How to enable the transfer of this knowledge to new
employees.
The major differentiator between our setting and
typical knowledge management setting dealing with
improved navigation browsing and searching is that
we focus on the process, in our case the informal
process of proposal development, and not only on
the end product –the final document.
In (Granitzer et al., 2008) the authors considered
using semantic wikis for organised provision and
efficient retrieval of information. Through their
analysis of different studies they claim that 80% of
knowledge which is required for performing
knowledge work is a result of informal learning.
Wikis were chosen as a supporting tool for informal
learning since they naturally foster participation and
collaboration. In (Schaffert, 2006) Schaffert
introduces ideas around merging social software
(wikis, blogs, social networks etc.) dealing with
social connections and human readable content
dealing with Semantic Web with formal content and
its formal connections. Semantic wikis are therefore
seen as a solution enabling interrelating of informal
unstructured collaboration and conversation records
in wikis. However Granitzer et al. only give an
example scenario, we take their hypothesis further
on and develop a prototype build upon extending
initial ideas.