Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is about taking a personal or individual perspective to Knowledge Management rather than an organizational or corporate one. PKM aims to make knowledge workers better at capturing, sharing, and using knowledge, and ...
Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is about taking a personal or individual perspective to Knowledge Management rather than an organizational or corporate one. PKM aims to make knowledge workers better at capturing, sharing, and using knowledge, and maximizing their personal effectiveness in the social aspect of their jobs. Knowledge workers have been using Desktop and Web applications to capture ideas, thoughts and to manage schedule, address etc. Although a number of applications such as email clients, word processors, and web browsers are essential for our daily routine, the current computing infrastructure for knowledge workers is ill-suited for personal knowledge-oriented activities.
Knowledge is scattered across applications and web sites, making it difficult to aggregate and reuse a right set of content and operations required for specific knowledge worker’s tasks. Although individual knowledge workers focus on their own knowledge activities, these activities have social characteristics such as connecting, communicating, collaborating with others. In other words, knowledge can be evolved by social interaction among knowledge workers. In this sense, PKM should support both individual and social level for knowledge activities. Traditional PKM systems tend to be suitable for supporting specific functions such as managing schedule, address for individual knowledge workers. But PKM is not only focused on managing such data, but also on connecting people and sharing data among them.
In this paper, I propose S2PKM (Social Software-based Personal Knowledge Management), which is a conceptual framework for representing personal knowledge activities for knowledge workers, by carrying out empirical studies. The S2PKM framework provides comprehensive perspectives to understand and to develop PKM. In the framework, PKM is an emerging discipline and concept combining with interdisciplinary concepts such as Knowledge Management, Complex System, Social Network, and Web Science etc.
The framework consists of four elements ? knowledge worker, knowledge, social knowledge activities, and social technology- to help and improve ability to meet personal and business objectives of PKM. Knowledge workers have different roles such as a knowledge consumer, a knowledge provider, or a member of communities. Knowledge for them can be differentiated by context what they need or where they do their task. Therefore, knowledge processes need to interlink or combine different types of knowledge. Knowledge processes, in general, transforms individual knowledge to social one or an opposite way through social interaction in communities where knowledge workers are involved. But, traditional approaches tend to focus on integrating and disseminating individual knowledge in order to build organizational knowledge. These approaches are limited to represent individual knowledge worker’s unstructured thinking, and to support continuous feedback or interactions with others. A Knowledge process of S2PKM defines the Social Knowledge Activities that consists of the Personal Knowledge Process, the Community Knowledge Process, and the Interaction Process. The Personal Knowledge Process consists of sub-process such as converse, search, subscribe, organize, evaluate, create, and share for personal productivity improvement of knowledge workers and the Community Process supports knowledge building in community level by dual-loop feedback. The Interaction process, which includes connection, communication, and collaboration, plays important roles to combine the Personal Knowledge and Community Knowledge Process. As the result by social interaction of the Social Knowledge Activities, knowledge tends to be emergent collective knowledge.
In the framework, information technology to realize PKM system is based on emerging Web paradigm such as Web 2.0 and Semantic Web. Web 2.0 comprises of technologies and services to enable knowledge workers to collaborate and share social contents. They include social software, content syndication, messaging protocols such weblogs, wikis, podcast, RSS feeds, The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily. Since these two paradigms have various web technologies such as AJAX, RSS, Mashups, RDF, SPARQL etc, PKM system can be constructed by integrating or combining these technologies.
I design and implement WANT (Wiki-based sociAl Network Thin client) that is a wiki-based personal semantic knowledge management system in order to collaborate and communicative knowledge creation and maintenance for knowledge workers. Wiki allows knowledge workers to make their internal knowledge more explicit and more formal. WANT supports a wide scope of social activities through online mash-up services and combine data with inter-connecting Desktop and Web environments. This system provides basic functionalities such as creating, organizing, and searching knowledge at individual level as well as enhances social connections among knowledge workers based on their activities.