Knowledge Sharing over the World Wide Web

This paper describes a system that facilitates and encourages the sharing of knowledge among groups of users within or across organizations. KSE (Knowledge Sharing Environment) is a system of information agents for organizing, summarizing, and sharing knowledge from a number of sources, including the World Wide Web, an organization's internal intranet, or other users. Users are organized into closed user groups or communities of interest with related or overlapping interests, such as members of a project team, students studying the same subject (perhaps at different institutions), or members of an organizational department. As well as sharing explicit (codified) knowledge, sharing of tacit knowledge is encouraged via automatic suggestion of and support for contact between people with mutual concerns or interests. Following a brief discussion of storing and organizing knowledge in KSE, the paper focuses on the following topics related to tacit and explicit knowledge in KSE: (1) ways that KSE facilitates access to and automatic sharing of explicit knowledge, including e-mail notification, keyword retrieval, a "What's new?" feature, and interest groups; (2) adaptive agents; and (3) finding people and tacit knowledge, i.e., the social aspects of the system. Two figures present a typical KSE home page and the main features of the KSE. (Author/AEF) ******************************************************************************** * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document. * ******************************************************************************** Knowledge Sharing over the World Wide Web kr) q;) "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY G. H.Marks (21 (.4 TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)." John Davies, Scott Stewart & Richard Weeks Knowledge Management Research BT Laboratories Ipswich IP5 3RE UK e-mail: john.davies(@,bt-sys.bt.co.uk U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) O This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. O Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy. Abstract: Large and increasing amounts of information are now available both on the Internet and on corporate intranets. With the availability of these vast networked information resources comes a requirement for tools to manage the information and provide users with the information they want, when they want it. Large and increasing amounts of information are now available both on the Internet and on corporate intranets. With the availability of these vast networked information resources comes a requirement for tools to manage the information and provide users with the information they want, when they want it. In this paper, we describe a system which facilitates and encourages the sharing of knowledge between groups of users within (or perhaps across) organizations. KSE (Knowledge Sharing Environment) is a system of information agents for organising, summarising and sharing knowledge from a number of sources, including the World Wide Web (WWW), an organization's internal intranet or from other users. Users are organized into closed user groups or communities of interest with related or overlapping interests. Such groups could be members of a project team, students studying the same subject (perhaps at different institutions), members of an organizational department, and so on. As well as sharing explicit (codified) knowledge; the sharing of tacit knowledge is encouraged via the automatic suggestion of and support for contact between people with mutual concerns or interests.