Preface for the Third Edition - Read

7. Systems 321
needed to manage meta-data about the knowledge workers that work with the
KMS, e.g., in directory services. Finally, synchronization services export a portion
of the knowledge workspace for work offline and (re-)integrate the work on knowledge
elements that has been done offline.
Infrastructure services. The personalization, knowledge and integration services
layers together can be viewed as a KMS in a narrow sense 517 . These layers are
based on an Intranet infrastructure which provides basic functionality for synchronous
and asynchronous communication, the sharing of data and documents as well
as the management of electronic assets in general and of Web content in particular.
In analogy to data warehousing, extract, transformation and loading tools provide
access to the data and knowledge sources 518 . Furthermore, inspection services
(viewer) are required for heterogeneous data and document formats. Inspection services
support viewing of documents without the corresponding application, e.g., a
text document without the text processing software that created the document.
Data and knowledge sources. The data and knowledge source layer gives some
examples of the wide variety of electronic sources for data and knowledge which
have to be integrated into the KMS or at least accessed through the KMS. In addition
to organization-internal sources, such as the organization’s transaction processing
systems, data base systems, data warehouses, document management systems,
content management systems, messaging systems and personal (or group)
information management systems, many organizations need to include organization-external
sources into their KMS. There is a huge and growing market for
external (on-line) data bases. They can be classified e.g., into fact data bases that
contain large collections of data and reference data bases which collect literature
and/or references to literature. Examples for some well-known data supply companies
that operate hundreds of data bases are (Mertens/Griese 2002, 20ff): DIALOG
Information Services, Lockheed Information System, Predicasts, Reuters, or the
Statistisches Bundesamt in Germany. Last but not least, the Internet, especially the
WWW and newsgroups, provide abundant material that has to be considered in a
KMS architecture.
In the following, the functions of a KMS that are required to perform these services
are discussed according to the layers shown in Figure B-59. The layers comprising
KMS in a narrow sense - personalization, knowledge services and integration,
are discussed in detail. Due to their importance as key components of KMS,
the four bundles discovery, publication, collaboration and learning that together
provide the knowledge services are discussed separately.
516. For a description of these dimensions see section 7.5.3 - “Example: Infotop” on
page 349.
517. See section 4.3.2 - “Definition” on page 86.
518. The input part of a data warehouse architecture has been called data acquisition layer,
Gray/Watson 1998, 17 or input layer, Muksch/Behme 1998a, 45.