Robert Stephens

Sociable knowledge sharing online: philosophy, patterns and intervention

Purpose – This paper seeks to outline a social epistemological and ethical warrant for engaging in knowledge exchange on the social web, and to emphasise socio‐cognitive and emotional factors behind motivation and credibility in communities supported by social software. An attempt is made to identify positive and negative patterns of interaction from this perspective and to argue for more positive intervention on the part of the information profession.Design/methodology/approach – The paper outlines social epistemological and related theory, cognitive and social drivers of behaviour and then draws together evidence to justify the definition of patterns that will be important to the project.Research limitations/implications – A programme of evaluating online knowledge exchange behaviour using a social epistemological framework is needed. In order to do this, methodological development coupling formal epistemological with interpretive techniques for examining belief formation are also necessary.Practical im...

A knowledge acquisition and representation scheme for constraint based and parallel systems

A knowledge acquisition and representation scheme is introduced which is suited both to serial processing in production systems and to a constraint-based representation evaluated in parallel. Two applications are described: a rule-based system for financial risk assessment in life insurance underwriting, and a decision-support aid for energy management in a steel plant. These have been programmed both in conventional serial languages and in Occam on a transputer.<<ETX>>

Information Systems as Linguistic Systems: A Constructivist Perspective

Information systems are usefully defined by Lyytinen (1987) as organisational communication systems that are just technically implemented and which rely to an increasing extent on information technology. This perspective directs attention to the language context; technology is always subordinated to, and supports language change. By treating information systems as fundamentally linguistic systems involving signals that are used by people in relationships, we will share Checkland and Scholes (1990, p55) concern for the attribution of meaning by the individual and the purposeful action which the information system serves. This requires attending to those meaning generating systems which individuals are involved in and attending to the meanings which make those particular actions meaningful to particular groups.

Embracing Information as Concept and Practice

In this position paper it is argued that generic theories of the information concept will be an obstacle to the Information Systems discipline assuming intellectual leadership of the information portfolio associated with the growth of computing technologies beyond the organization.

The Human-Centred Paradigm in KBS Design Theory

In this paper we outline two radically different approaches to Knowledge Based Systems development and suggest that progress has been hampered through uncritical adoption of the methods and metaphors of hard science, leading to a ‘techno-centric’ conception of knowledge. The technical advantages of this approach however, tend to be gained at the expense of the overall human-machine functionality by denying the value of the user’s construction of knowledge and subserving the user’s problem solving ability to the dictates of pre-conceived software. The contrasting, human-oriented, approach to developing systems views knowledge as socially distributed and owned, implying methods for agreeing common understanding coupled with a devolution of responsibility for knowledge construction onto those whose world it affects.

INTERSUBJECTIVTY IN INTERPRETIVE RESEARCH: THE DIALOGICAL CASE

In this paper the concept of intersubjectivity as it is employed in Information Systems research is reviewed from the perspective of dialogism developed in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. A form of communicative understanding is presupposed in most IS analytic activities; intersubjectivity is the general criteria for interpretive studies that are acclaimed by the attempt to understand phenomena according to the meanings that people assign to them. Typically, it is said to be achieved empathetically by the generation of shared interpretations of the actions, practices and objects within the cultural systems that give them significance. The quality of engagement between participants is increasingly regarded as a key element in successful IT development, for example Participant Design, Joint Application Development, cooperative and interpretive methodologies, all recommend that system development is enhanced by user participation, albeit in varying degrees of involvement, and authenticity of analytic categories is assured in common understanding.

THE ROLE OF SURPLUS VISION IN KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS

Although it is topical to distinguish knowledge-based organizations, work or economies as a progression from the industrial, factory era, knowledge has of course always been key to organizational success. However, partly because of the availability of appropriate technology and partly because of the IT enabled structural change in organizations the idea of knowledge systems within institutions has gained currency. This follows a long tradition of attempting to make knowledge robust and explicit through procedures and technologies, and a more mixed history of support for cultures of knowledge (Dixon, 2000) or communities of practice (Seely Brown and Duguid, 2000). As Zuboff (1989) observed, information systems and technologies can augment either, but not both of these traditions. Recent trends in networking, internet technologies, standards and markup languages such as ontologies and XML, support the former, but evidence suggests (see Kling, 2000) that on their own they will not informate the knowledge activities in organizations.

Representation and Double-Level Language in Information Systems

A recent theme in some contemporary research suggests that organizational realities and structures endure to the extent they are made and remade in social praxis. Accordingly, effective information systems development and operation depends on a subtle interplay of the technical and social. Viability is thus sustained not by appeal to a pre-ordained organizational structure, but in a linguistically mediated cycle of assimilation and accommodation. In this paper we seek to capture this notion by examining representation as both synchronic and diachronic, and developing the concept of ‘double-level language’ to describe how formal and informal languages are mutually supportive.

A Model for Supporting Interacting Knowledge Sources

In this chapter we use a Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) perspective to describe a formal model for representing and reconciling disparate viewpoints in knowledge-based problem solving for Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and team decision making. We view the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within CSCW as one of providing knowledge representation formalisms and inference techniques to mediate information between socially distributed agents.

Linguistic Categories in Knowledge Based Systems

In the knowledge elicitation phase of system development, (which has affinities with general requirements analysis, and by extension almost any psychological investigation of someone’s “knowledge”), normally an investigator with expertise in modelling or system building enters into communication with a practitioner or theoretician in a domain of interest. Their interaction is largely mediated through linguistic channels (i.e. talking) and will ideally result in a tokenised representation of the expert’s utterances. This should be both computationally or systematically tractable, and interpretable by a (usually dissociated) third party using the representation for practical purposes.