Conferences - Reinforcement Papers - Washington, DC

Knowledge Management Comes of Age
September 23-24, 2003
Hilton Alexandria Mark Center
Washington, DC

Index to Papers

The URLs are offered for reference to the original web-based documents, or to documents available on the TTI/Vanguard web site. The page length may vary slightly, based on your browser settings.

Community Knowledge Sharing in Practice by Daniel G. Bobrow and Jack Whalen

Tacit, or informal knowledge, is deeply rooted in the experiences of individuals and the culture of their work communities. The authors document their experiences over a period of seven years with the design, development, deployment and evaluation of capturing new ideas generated by people at work: the Eureka system at Xerox Corporation.
http://www.dialogonleadership.org/EurekaStory.pdf (24 pages)

What Do You Mean? Finding Answers to Complex Questions by Anne R. Diekema, Ozgur Yilmazel, Jiangping Chen, Sarah Harwell, Lan He, Elizabeth D. Liddy

The authors discuss the development of a question and answer process for complex questions, focusing on their attempts to incorporate and implement a question negotiation module based on the traditional reference interview.
http://cnlp.org/publications/AAAI2003.pdf (7 pages)

Data Mining in Social Networks by David Jensen and Jennifer Neville

The authors examine recent work in machine learning and data mining, but lament the lack of cross-disciplinary efforts and research in other areas, such as social network analysis and statistics.
http://kdl.cs.umass.edu/people/jensen/papers/nas02.pdf (13 pages)

Applying the Semantic Web Vision to Enterprise Data Management: A Case Study by Zvi Schreiber

Speaker Zvi Schreiber contends that the semantic web and its underlying technologies can be used by large enterprises with thousands of databases, each of which is semantically different. This paper is a case study of how semantics were applied to enterprise data management.
http://www2003.org/cdrom/papers/alternate/P079/p79-schreiber-WWW2003.htm (4 pages)

Metadata Principles and Practicalities by Eric Duval, Wayne Hodgins, Stuart Sutton, and Stuart Weibel

The authors describe metadata as a tool for describing and managing information resources, yet there is much confusion about how metadata should be integrated into information systems. This paper describes the principles and practicalities that might impact the design of any metadata schema or application.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april02/weibel/04weibel.html (15 pages)

Interactive Visualization of Multiple Query Results by Susan Havre, Elizabeth Hetzler, Ken Perrine, Elizabeth Jurrus, and Nancy Miller

The authors detail a graphical method for visually presenting and exploring the results of multiple queries from a single user simultaneously. They conclude that this approach might assist users in improving their queries.
http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/sparklerinfovis01.pdf (8 pages)

ThemeRiver: Visualizing Thematic Changes in Large Document Collections by Susan Havre, Elizabeth Hetzler, Paul Whitney, Lucy Nowell

The authors detail their work with ThemeRiver, a prototype developed to test the value of the river metaphor for revealing patterns, relationships, and trends in themes of a document collection.
http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/ThemeRiverIEEE2002.pdf (12 pages)

Information Sharing for Homeland Defense: Concerns and Suggestions by Kay Hammer

Speaker Kay Hammer outlines the risks associated with the sharing of information and proposes how one might build a non-invasive delivery architecture that could address such risks.
http://www.ttivanguard.com/dcreconn/infosharing.pdf (11 pages)

Information Sharing for Homeland Defense: High-level Function Description of Architecture Proposed in October 2002 by Kay Hammer

Kay Hammer lays out specific as well as classes of products that could serve as the basis for what she calls a “Homeland Defense Enterprise Architecture.”
http://www.ttivanguard.com/dcreconn/architecture.pdf (8 pages)

Knowledge Hoarding by Sara Michael

As different governmental agencies deal with the issue of knowledge hoarding, several are seeking to motivate their employees to support KM initiatives by establishing incentive programs, including cash payments.
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2003/0428/mgt-know-04-28-03.asp (2 pages)

REFERENCES FROM PREVIOUS TTI/VANGUARD CONFERENCES

Previous TTI/Vanguard Conferences have contained discussions and presentations
on a number of topics related to those being presented at our conference in Washington, DC.
These may be accessed from the Members’ section of our web site
(www.ttivanguard.com) as Reinforcements and as the actual presentations.

Knowledge, Search and Understanding – TTI/Vanguard Conference
At this TTI/Vanguard conference, we looked at knowledge management's most plausible organizational impacts over the next 2-5 years. But knowledge in itself was not the objective. The desirable outcome was understanding, and the ability to leverage that understanding into organizational effectiveness. Speakers discussed an information sharing architecture that addresses capabilities for search, analysis, collaboration, data mining, distribution, and tool selection and deployment.
December, 1999 – Dallas, Texas

TACIT KNOWLEDGE
	The Intractable Nature of Wetware: Tacit Knowledge, Expertise, and Creativity – Dorothy Leonard, Harvard Business School Creativity can flourish when groups of diverse but individually knowledgeable and receptive people are presented with goals to stretch their collective abilities. Through extensive research of the creative process, Dorothy Leonard identifies steps along the path to creativity and offers suggestions for creativity-boosting software: (1) preparation, (2) innovation opportunity, (3) divergence/generating options, (4) incubation, and (5) convergence/selecting options. April, 2001 – Los Angeles, California

	Expressive Systems – Richard Pawson, CSC The purgatory of script-driven requisition is commonplace. It may present itself as a seemingly endless set of form fields that must be completed before being told that, regardless of the precise nature of the entered data, the basic request cannot be fulfilled. Richard Pawson seeks to unlock the potential of systems and users alike, by building in expressivity and business agility through object orientation. September, 2000 – San Jose, California

SEMANTIC WEB
	Bringing the Web to Programs – R.V. Guha, IBM Research The World Wide Web makes publishing on the Internet sufficiently easy to permit anyone to participate—and everyone does. Programs, however, are unable to access the wealth of data distributed across the Web, powerless as they are to read unstructured text. Even a site that has been augmented with structured extensible markup language (XML) metadata is substantially indecipherable by machines beyond the borders of its own domain, despite early promises of Web-wide compatibility. The source of the broken promise is a semantic disconnect that was built into the XML specification. Even when this problem is overcome, how will machines know what data is trustworthy? September, 2002 – Miami, Florida

	Evolving Platform Requirements... – Edmund Muth, Microsoft The World Wide Web exists for transactional purposes, or thus states the prevailing paradigm. Thus far, the Web has fit a client-server model, but the time is coming when Web-based distributed processing will become the norm, and integration of Web services will be controlled by individual users. Initial progress will likely appear as linear extensions of current practices, but creative and dramatic transformations will occur in time. October, 1999 – Phoenix, Arizona

SEARCH
	Large-Scale Searches Using Geo-Analysis – John Frank, MetaCarta, Inc. September, 2002 – Miami, Florida Living as we do in the physical world, matters of importance are frequently associated with geographic locations. By combining search by keyword with search by location, the relative merit of documents can become as plain as points on a map. September, 2002 – Miami, Florida

	Always On… Always Aware… The Final Frontier – Net Life, 2260-2264 – Craig Silverstein, Google, Inc. As the Web has grown, so has the need for capable search engines. Craig Silverstein of Google continually strives to fulfil the Google mission—“to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google’s path to this goal is not to make computers smart, but to make them seem smart by capturing the intelligence of humans. September, 2002 – Miami, Florida

	Software Demo: Enfish Onespace – Louise Wannier, Enfish Enfish is creating computer programs that try to understand you and how you work. Eventually, computers will need to operate the way humans think: in words, by subject, by person, by company, and by what they are working on, linking related information and thoughts. Louise Wannier previews Enfish Enterprise, an integrated portal solution that unlocks the usability of your enormous investment in enterprise software through measurably increasing the ability of your workers to access and use information. September, 2001 – Seattle, Washington

	Enhancing Human Decision-Making – Michael Iron, WebMap A map is a streamlined version of physical space—but it is also much more. Maps of physical space wed the physicality of the world with information about it. By overlaying the basic geography of a region with, perhaps, labeled roads, municipal boundaries, directionality of streets, and sites of interest, maps enhance the decision-making ability of a traveler by delivering a great deal of varied information in an overview format. By distilling the underlying data into boundary lines and iconic representations, mapmakers hide the complex process of data acquisition, sorting, manipulation, and processing, and instead bring to the forefront patterns and trends that might easily remain hidden if only textual or numerical data were examined directly. At WebMap, Michael Iron seeks to extend the benefit of maps of physical space to bring clarity to any informational realm, thereby bolstering a viewer’s analytical capacity. November, 2001 – Washington, DC

	The Search for Patterns – Murray Gell-Mann, Santa Fe Institute Fundamental distinctions may be drawn between types of information. At its most basic, information is simply a collection of bits: zeros and ones. Given a context, bits become infused with meaning and take on the role of knowledge, although knowledge in this sense may be true or false. Undoubtedly, use of false knowledge is inappropriate, yet other improper uses of knowledge abound. When understanding is poor, knowledge may be used outside of the realm of applicability; alternatively, unnecessarily narrow application may leave opportunities unexploited. Only with the wedding of information with understanding can knowledge, at its best, prevail; only when theory and data are considered in concert can meaning be made of correlations. October, 1999 – Phoenix, Arizona

	Extensible Information Systems – David Overskei, Polexis, Inc. Strategic decisions rely on the effective integration, analysis, and resolution of manifold data items in diverse formats that originate from myriad sources. In time-critical situations, some essential data will be static, whereas others will continually vary across time and space. David Overskei of Polexis speaks of his company’s Extensible Information System (XIS), a middleware platform that performs the necessary real-time integration of data, applications, and systems into a visually rich and flexible interface from which knowledge workers can effectively assimilate data to make actionable decisions. November, 2002 – San Diego, California

DATABASES
	MyLifeBits -- Store Everything in the Terabyte PC – Gordon Bell, Vanguard Advisory Board Vannevar Bush laid down the gauntlet in The Atlantic Monthly article, “As We May Think,” nearly 60 years ago. There he imagined “a memex device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” It has taken decades of Moore’s Law-accelerated development of the digital computer to enable Bush’s dream to take form. Finally the time has arrived, with Microsoft serving as the company to deliver the goods and Vanguard Advisory Board member Gordon Bell as the guinea pig in this experiment in data accumulation, annotation, linking, representation, and search. May, 2003 – Denver, Colorado

	A 100-TB Database System for Under $500K – Brewster Kahle, Alexa Internet This talk describes a 100TB database system used by Alexa Internet, a company that collects, datamines, and serves information about the web. The combination of commodity hardware, simple data structures, and straightforward database tools have enabled Alexa to drop the cost of a database system while gaining performance and flexibility. September, 2001 – Seattle, Washington

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
	Knowledge Management: A Fad or a Vital Need? – Baruch Lev, New York University This presentation examines the solutions to accounting for intangible value. Traditional accounting practices rely solely on executed transactions, i.e., legal exchange of property rights. However, the monetization of knowledge and its effective management—intangible though these assets may be—significantly fills the gap between book and market valuations. May, 2000 – Washington, DC

	How to Avoid Crisis: Reasoning Together – Gregory Mack, Hicks and Associates The end of the Cold War ushered in an era of reduced tensions in one arena, only to broaden the scope of threats to U.S. national security to include a greater number of smaller actors in the new multipolar world. The historically closed organizations within the intelligence community are charged with the responsibility to meaningfully work together. Gregory Mack tells of technological tools and communication strategies that are under development at DARPA’s Project Genoa to anticipate and mitigate latent crises in order to defuse them before they erupt. November, 2001 – Washington, DC