Supported by
SGAICO (Swiss Group for Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive
Science)
and the
Special Interest Group "Knowledge Engineering" of the German
Computer
Society
-- Call for Papers --
Aims and scope of the conference
----------
It is widely acknowledged that knowledge is one of the most important
assets of organizations. Especially companies in industrialised countries
with high wages can only compete on the global market when offering
products that are based on advanced technology or when trading the
technology itself, thus having an advantage over companies in countries
with low salaries. These companies depend on highly educated and skilled
employees as well as on short innovation cycles, high flexibility and
creativity. One of the prerequisites to achieving this is a systematic
management of the key success factor "knowledge".
Knowledge Management is primarily an issue of enterprise organization and
enterprise management but there are many central and important issues
which can be supported or even enabled by state-of-the-art information
systems. Consequently, approaches to Knowledge Management need to be
rooted in business and organization science as well as in computer
science. However, conferences and workshops on Knowledge Management
typically either cover approaches from the first or the second area only.
Although such events are certainly worthwhile we feel that bringing
together people from both areas and giving them a forum for exchanging
ideas will lead to Knowledge Management solutions that are much more
useful and effective.
The PAKM Conference is dedicated to that quite challenging aim. It will
bring together people from both areas, namely
* people who have an organizational perspective on Knowledge Management,
e.g. have practical experience in introducing Knowledge Management in
organisations, or are concerned with more theoretical approaches to
managing the resource "knowledge"
* people with an information technology point of view on Knowledge
Management who, e.g., have developed tools for Knowledge Management, or
are investigating on a more theoretical level technological frameworks
for Knowledge Management
Several sessions with a workshop-like character will serve as a forum for
interaction. Each workshop will deal with a certain Knowledge Management
problem that calls for solutions on the organizational as well as on the
technological side. In this way, PAKM enables and supports interactions
and information flows of the following kinds:
* Organizational and management solutions often include processes or
structures that hold a potential for employing computer-supported
approaches to increase efficiency and/or effectiveness. Sometimes, an
information system is even mandatory for the whole Knowledge Management
approach to work. Thus, participants from the information technology
area get the excellent opportunity to learn about real-world
requirements, to identify the organizational framework certain kinds of
information systems must take into account, and get new ideas about
what specific kinds of Knowledge Management systems are needed.
* Technological solutions are useless unless they fit into a given
organizational environment. Participants presenting their technology
approaches can get feedback on how well their systems meet reality.
* Organizational solutions often can benefit from making use of
information technology. Thus, participants from the area of
organizational and management solutions may find it valuable to get
feedback on where an additional usage of information technology could
lead to improvements in their solutions.
* Participants from the organizational and management solutions area have
the opportunity to learn what kind of systems are technologically
feasible and may be inspired to envision completely new kinds of
solutions to certain Knowledge Management problems.
Additional to the workshop sessions each of the two conference days will
start with an invited talk. The conference will close with a plenary
session where the main results from the workshops will be presented to all
participants.
Contributions sought
--------
We seek original contributions that describe approaches to solve a
particular Knowledge Management problem. The approach may be of a
technological nature, of a management/organizational nature, or a
combination of both. In any case, to avoid toy problems and purely
academic approaches being discussed, every paper must clearly describe the
(real-world) problem being tackled and point out the added value of
solving that problem. The paper should give a clear description why and
how the presented approach solves the problem. It should further be made
clear in which aspects the suggested approach is a new one. A very
important requirement is that at least the essentials of the approach must
be presented in a way such that it will be comprehensible by all
participants, including those from the "other area" (e.g., information
technology people in the case you describe an organizational solution).
Submitted papers may be full papers with up to 12 pages and 30 minutes
presentation time, or short papers with up to 5 pages and 15 minutes time
for presentation.
All accepted papers will be presented at the conference. They will be
grouped to (parallel) session according to the issues they address. The
sessions will be held as workshops, i.e. with one or two people
coordinating the whole session, and with making sure that there is ample
discussion time. Depending on the number of papers allocated to a session
it may last a whole day or even longer. The proceedings with all accepted
papers will be available at the conference.
Possible workshop topics are the main topics listed below; papers may
address one or more of the subtopics given, or may address other topics as
well as long as they fit into the overall conference theme:
* Building and maintaining an inventory of the knowledge available in the
organization (with people, in files, databases, documents)
o setting up appropriate communication links between people, groups,
departments to communicate what skills and knowledge they have
o meta information systems
* Bringing the knowledge existing somewhere inside or outside the
organization to those places where it is needed
o aligning organizational structures towards a knowledge sharing
community
o group support systems
o decision support systems, just-in-time knowledge delivery systems,
electronic performance support systems
o information retrieval: interest profiles, information filtering,
automatic text understanding, searching the world wide web,
personal web agents
* Making sure that available knowledge is reused and not reinvented
o documentation and annotation of knowledge to facilitate its being
assimilated by people who did not provide it
o ontologies and enterprise data models to provide a common
terminological framework
o automatic text summarization to facilitate selection of relevant
texts
o group support systems
o automatic indexing and abstracting of texts
* Capturing and securing knowledge to avoid it from getting lost
o designing business processes such that knowledge generated in
ongoing work is easily and immediately captured
o implementing lessons learned processes
o organizational memories: knowledge integration, knowledge sharing,
versioning, contexts, high-level modelling languages for
non-computer scientists
o knowledge extraction from texts
* Developing new knowledge
o organizational measures for supporting and stimulating innovation
o information systems for supporting creative processes (exploration
of data spaces, visualization tools, etc.)
o data mining (from data, text, and the web)
Important dates
---------------
Submission of full papers or short papers by July, 11, 1998
Acceptance notices mailed by August, 21, 1998
Final, camera-ready papers due by September, 25, 1998
Submission format
-----------------
Full papers may have up to 12 pages, short papers up to 5 pages, both in
an
11pt font and single-spaced. We accept either electronic submission in
Postscript or Word format, or paper submissions (in 4 copies) to the
following address:
Ulrich Reimer
Swiss Life
Information Systems Research Group
Postfach
CH-8022 Zurich, Switzerland
Email: Ulrich.Reimer@swisslife.ch
Program committee
-----------------
Chair:
Ulrich Reimer (Swiss Life, Switzerland)
Co-chair:
Michael Wolf (Swiss Bank Corporation, Switzerland)
Members:
Rose Dieng (INRIA, France)
Udo Hahn (University of Freiburg, Germany)
Thomas Herrmann (University of Dortmund, Gemany)
Dirk E. Mahling (University of Pittsburgh, and Ernst & Young, USA)
Katharina Morik (University of Dortmund, Gemany)
Brian (Bo) Newman (Founder, Knowledge Management Forum, USA)
Franz Schmalhofer (DFKI, Germany)
Patricia S. Seeman (Group 21, Switzerland)
Rudi Studer (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)
Ulrich Thiel (GMD-IPSI, Germany)
Gertjan van Heijst (CIBIT, Netherlands)
Karl M. Wiig (Knowledge Research Institute, USA)
Betty Zucker (Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, Switzerland)
- to be extended -
Organization
Ulrich Reimer (Swiss Life, Switzerland)
Michael Wolf (Swiss Bank Corporation, Switzerland)
Conference secretariat
Annemarie Nicolet (SI, Switzerland)
--Ulrich Reimer <Ulrich.Reimer@swisslife.ch>
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