Organizational Development for Knowledge Management at Water ...

TECHNOLOGY-RELATED TOOLS
Collaborative Decision Support Systems. When decisions are based on inputs from multiple
domains, teams are required to ensure the experience to act effectively. Simultaneously,
expertise may be in other organizations or geographic locations. A recent resource that
extensively presents the current state of decision support systems is The Handbook on Decision
Support Systems (edited by F. Burstein and C.W. Holsapple) (Springer-Verlag, 2007). See the
NASA case study on Web-Based Collaborative Decision Support.
Folksonomy. Organic system of organization that is simply a set of terms that a group of users
apply to content (a user-driven taxonomy). “Folksonomy” (a combination of “folk” and
“taxonomy” was used by Thomas Vander Wal in a discussion on an information mailing list.
Unlike a taxonomy, a Folksonomy has no hierarchical relationships, rather automatically
generated “related” tags which are clustered based on URLs. While this system of building a
taxonomy provides the opportunity for individuality and entertaining creativity and carries an
element of surprise, there are limitations and weaknesses due to an uncontrolled vocabulary
that support ambiguities and multiple terms for the same concepts. The point folksonomies
bring to bear is their representation of the user’s language, a critical point to reflect upon when
developing a taxonomy.
Multiple Search Technologies. Searching capability is a system, not a single tool. Rather, it
is an integration of multiple search technologies which can include text and graphical search
results and crawler and query systems for both structured and unstructured content. The
system must be capable of precision, recall, discovery and agility. Core capabilities of a search
system include:
User controlling the accuracy of a search, ranging from extreme precision (only relevant
content with risk of missing some) to extreme recall (all relevant content with risk of nonrelevant
material) and all points in between.
Results are presented as text and graphical profiles modifiable for greater accuracy.
Search output becomes input (can improve relevancy by graphically modifying results;
add-by-click concepts and entities; and change importance and weighting).
Suggestions to user for improving the search (mining results for concepts/entities not in
previous search).
Prefers plain language as input (context of terms and phrases is exposed for
disambiguation to provide greater relevance—key words are not necessary).
Social Bookmarking. A system of free-form tagging used by software designed as social
bookmarks manager. One example is Del.icio.us, a tool to organize web pages. When
browsing a web page, users can select the bookmark and are presented with a form that allows
them to enter any tags they want to associate with the page, then save it. The tags are used to
automatically generate a chronological ordering of bookmarks saved to the systems and to
collocate bookmarks within a user’s collection. They are also used to collocate bookmarks
across the entire system, thereby providing tagged bookmarks for other users. Another
example is Flickr, a photo management and sharing web application that uses free-form tagging
for photos. Both examples require user accounts.
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