"The business environment is rapidly changing, and intellectual capital is a key asset of the enterprise. By managing its knowledge assets, an enterprise can improve its adaptability and increase its chances for survival. The papers in this issue of the IBM Systems Journal deal with various aspects of knowledge management: supporting technologies, products, and social aspects."

Here's the abstract for the first article, entitled _Communities of practice and organizational performance_:

As organizations grow in size, geographical scope, and complexity, it is increasingly apparent that sponsorship and support of communities of practice -- groups whose members regularly engage in sharing and learning, based on common interests -- can improve organizational performance. ... To build an understanding of how communities of practice create organizational value, we suggest thinking of a community as an engine for the development of social capital. We argue that the social capital resident in communities of practice leads to behavioral changes, which in turn positively influence business performance. We identify four specific performance outcomes associated with the communities of practice we studied and link these outcomes to the basic dimensions of social capital. These dimensions include connections among practitioners who may or may not be co-located, relationships that build a sense of trust and mutual obligation, and a common language and context that can be shared by community members. Our conclusions are based on a study of seven organizations where communities of practice are acknowledged to be creating value.

IBM Systems Journal - Vol. 40, No. 4, 2001 - Knowledge Management

This paper is published in the January 2002 issue of IEEE Computer magazine, pp. 54-62.

The Interspace: Concept Navigation Across Distributed Communities
by Bruce R. Schatz

Abstract: With the Interspace, the global information infrastructure will, for the first time, directly support interaction with abstraction. This infrastructure uses technologies that go beyond searching individual repositories to analyze and correlate knowledge across multiple sources and subjects. The Interspace will offer distributed services to transfer concepts across domains, just as Arpanet used distributed services to transfer files across machines and the Internet uses distributed services to transfer objects across repositories. Standard protocols for the emerging information infrastructure will support searching knowledge collections maintained and indexed by specialized communities and residing directly on users' personal machines. These protocols will automatically interconnect related logical spaces, letting individuals navigate across community repositories rather than searching for interlinked objects within physical networks. The Community Architectures for Network Information Systems Laboratory has developed a working Interspace prototype that uses scalable technologies for concept extraction and navigation. They have successfully tested these technologies, which compute contextual frequency of document phrases within community repository, on discipline-scale, real-world collections. Within the next decade, semantic indexing will extend beyond concepts and categories to perspectives, which relate concepts within categories, and situations, which relate categories within collections. These more abstract semantic levels will lead to a closer matching of the meanings in the user's mind to the world's objects.

The Interspace: Concept Navigation Across Distributed Communities

Lots of interesting papers are available here. This conference was held in Ireland in June 2001. Here are a few of the paper titles:
Using Dimensionality Reduction to Improve Similarity Judgements for Recommendation
Paths and Contextually Specific Recommendations
Combining Dynamic Agents and Collaborative Filtering ... for Better Recommendation Quality
Relevance Feedback for Best Match Term Weighting Algorithms in Information Retrieval
Personalization through Specification Refinement and Composition
Relevance Feedback and Personalization: A Language Modeling Perspective
Comparing Recommendations Made by Online Systems and Friends
Flycasting: On the Fly Broadcasting
Personalization and Recommender Systems in the Larger Context: New Directions and Research Questions

Proceedings of the Second DELOS Network of Excellence Workshop on Personalisation and Recommender Systems in Digital Libraries

Social navigation is a vibrant new field which examines how we navigate information spaces in "real" and "virtual" environments, how we orient and guide ourselves, and how we interact with and use others to find our way in information spaces. This approach brings a new way of thinking about how we design information spaces, emphasising our need to see others, collaborate with them, and follow the trails of their activities in these spaces. Social Navigation of Information Space is the first major work in this field, and includes contributions by many of the originators and key thinkers. It will be of particular interest to researchers and students in areas related to CSCW and human computer interaction. As a thoroughly multi-disciplinary topic, it will also be of interest to researchers in cognitive psychology, social psychology, philosophy, linguistics, sociology, architecture and anthropology.

Social Navigation of Information Space

Philip S. Antón, Richard Silberglitt, and James Schneider
Prepared for the National Intelligence Council. 92 pages.

This (c)2001 RAND publication is freely available online in HTML and PDF. It provided input to the US government's Global Trends 2015 document. Here's the publisher's summary:

Various technologies have the potential for significant and dominant global effects within the next few decades. This report provides a quick look at global technology trends in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and materials technology and their implications for information technology and the world in 2015.

The Global Technology Revolution

Tom: "Rock. HP is playing around with augmented reality technology that allows you to tie audio messages to a physical location. Ultimately I'd like to see this sort of system tied into display technology such that you can create virtual objects that exist in real places."

For me, the most interesting parts of the article are these:

"A universal open messaging system also raises questions about privacy and the reliability of information. [Description of self-promotion.] [Developers] say prototypes ... will help them deal with problems of privacy and security. ... a paid service [to] guarantee authenticity and usefulness. ... embedd[ed] ... personal profiles ... only allowing acceptable people ... refuse to release your exact coordinates ... "the attractive features outweigh the drawbacks."

How is this system going to be secured? Can't one just supply false coordinates and post/read anything regardless of location? If a message is posted on private property, does this constitute trespassing? In what ways is it different from posting a physical sign at some (public? private?) location, then leaving? Can the next guy that comes along remove or replace it? How about standing at a location and repeating a message (instead of having the technology do it for you)? You can expect new legislation because of this, but at first, existing laws against graffiti, littering, trespassing, etc. will be used to try to remove or block messages.

New Scientist | Mobile Phones | Write here, write now

Excerpts from the publisher's overview:

Mainstream data mining techniques significantly limit the role of human reasoning and insight. ... [This is] the first book to explore the fertile ground of uniting data mining and data visualization principles in a new set of knowledge discovery techniques. ... The book ... details current efforts to include visualization and user interaction in data mining and explores the potential for further synthesis of data mining algorithms and data visualization techniques.

Information Visualization in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery

David Gerlernter, writing in the Dec 12 NYT, reviews two new books: Lessig's _The Future of Ideas_ and Steve Lohr's _GoTo_. Apparently excerpting from _GoTo_, he quotes Brian Behlendorf as saying that computer programming must be "accessible to everyone. ... Not being able to program is going to be like not being able to drive -- lacking a fundamental skill in our society." Gerlenter comments in reply: There is no more revealing quote in the whole technology literature.

All in all, a good, brief article. Worth a look.

The Computer World, Inside and Out

Here's a new paper published in the December issue of First Monday. The table of contents:

Introduction: Free Software as a Problem of Value and Reputation
Like Science
Credit and Reputation in Science
Citations and Reputations: Metaphors of Currency and Property
Conclusion: Further Thoughts on Reputation and Currency

Some excerpts:

Over the last few years, as the Open Source/Free Software movement has become a constant in the business and technology press, generating conferences, spawning academic investigations and business ventures alike, one single question seems to have beguiled nearly everyone: "how do you make money with free software?" If the question isn't answered with a business plan, it is inevitably directed towards some notion of "reputation".

... this paper examines ... some works in ... science that have encountered remarkably similar problems ... and [compares science and software] with respect to their "currencies" and "intellectual property".

Free Software/Free Science

David Dickson, founder of the new site SciDev.Net (also logged today), writes in the December 6 _Nature_ about the use of the web to engage the public in issues of science and technology. Brief and to the point. Worth reading. (Free registration required.) Excerpts:

We all stand to benefit from the exploration of ways to use the power of the Internet to disseminate reliable scientific and technical information. ... There is a particular opportunity here to use the Internet to meet the social and economic needs of developing countries. ... [SciDev.Net will] seek to exploit new opportunities opened up by the web. ... A key challenge to initiatives such as SciDev.Net is how to democratize the gathering and dissemination of information about science in a way that retains the legitimating devices of conventional editorial processes.

Weaving a Social Web