Information and Knowledge Management using ArcGIS ModelBuilder

Cuneyt Gurcan Akcora, Barbara Carminati and Elena Ferrari
In commercial solutions, the organization is built around a central entity, mainly because this entity
provides the means for cooperation, and the entity benefits from the work of other individual entities.
Those small entities also benefit from cooperation, but they are replaceable. In this approach the
central node does not need to cultivate relationships among members. In commercial solutions that
involve individuals, freelancing leads the way by web sites like Freelancer.com and
Freelanceswitch.com where one time services are offered for small fees. Similarly, online job
agencies help individuals find employment opportunities.
One of the most relevant fields that can benefit from VHO is the humanitarian organizations. For
instance, in emergency related volunteerism, Crisiscommons.org provides a venue for digital
participation and works to increase member interactions by organizing the ”Crisis camps”. On the
other hand, web organizations, such as Jffixler.com and Rmhc.org, offer general purpose volunteering
services to individuals. All of these services suffer from locality; they cannot reach all potential
members. Although they have Facebook pages, users can only ”Like” them, and this Facebook page
cannot read user profiles to reach users of relevant skill sets.
Governments have seen the importance of collaborative networks, and funded projects for data
sharing and processing. For example, in the Global Information Grid Project4, the US government is
establishing an Internet based data processing, sharing and storage framework
(www.nsa.gov/ia/programs/). To increase collaboration among companies, European Union has
funded the Information and Communication Technologies programme in the Seventh Framework
Programme (http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/). The programme includes studies such as ”Advanced
legal issues in virtual enterprises” and ”European collaborative networked organizations leadership
initiative”.
In non-governmental organizations, Internet has seen rise of very successful collaborative networks
like Wikipedia.org, where members share a common goal and have hierarchically structured roles in
the collaboration process to create high quality content (Javanmardi and Lopes 2010). Indeed, some
collaboration networks have produced products such as the Apache web server and the Linux
operating system which paved the way to increase Internet usage by providing cheap/free end
products.
However, none of these existing technologies provide integration with real life social networks.
Instead, they create the infrastructure to build proprietary social networks (Yang and Chen 2008). As
a result, these real life solutions have not seen a meaningful increase in user participation (Matheson,
Ruben and Ross 2009) despite advances in internet technologies.
5. Characteristics and requirements of VHOs
In this section, we will start with creation, and then proceed to explain following phases in life cycle of
a VHO (Camarinha-Matos and Afsarmanesh 2008).
5.1 Creation
The life cycle of our target VHO starts after the social network begins its service. The organization is
started by creating a central node on the social network. At least one administrator initially creates
and manages the central node. On Facebook, this refers to creating an application which asks social
network users to accept sharing their profile information and e-mail addresses with the application
and allow the application to send them messages. Profile information includes current location,
hometown location, work history, education history, gender and age. After getting Facebook
permissions from the user, the application connects to user profile and reads profile data.
In subsequent visits by the user, the Facebook application authenticates users through tools
(www.developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/) provided by Facebook (API components), hence
it does not need to store user names and passwords on its servers.
Figure 1 (a) shows the social network state when the application page is first created. In this figure
two fictional locations, A and B, are shaded to indicate users from these geographic locations, and
users that are similar in values are shown with letter V.
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