Keywords

1 Introduction

The engineering empirical knowledge (EEK) in engineering practice refers to the experience and skills acquired by engineers from both successful and failed cases in the design process, which is regarded as a precious asset of an enterprise. The characteristics of EEK are non-standard organized, highly professional, and difficult to be replicated. Therefore, the difficulty of managing and indexing the EEK items increases, and the threshold of replication of EEK raises. In particular, the requirement of identification and standardization of EEK make it important to improve the knowledge management.

The carrier of EEK mainly includes documents, pictures, videos, etc. Many enterprises’ EEK is stored as document in the intranet, or even stored as hard copy in the reference room. According to the characteristics of document-based EEK, this paper defines the structure of EEK as a three-tier system from top to bottom: basic attributes, semantic features, and data contents. The basic attributes include contributors, ID numbers, names, and the time that a piece of EEK was created or last modified. Semantic features are keyword tags that reflect specific contexts and technologies in the engineering field. Data contents contain the characteristics of knowledge content.

Given the rapidly changing knowledge that owns a large number of files in broad areas, it is difficult for the original knowledge management information system to accumulate EEK accurately and efficiently. To describe a piece of EEK without ambiguity or misdirection, the accumulation process of EEK requires many engineers collaborating to refine and verify. Therefore, enterprises need domain experts to provide professional modification and verification regularly to ensure the EKK of high quality. Additionally, enterprises want to take measures to provide the employees easier access to EEK, even to realize the personalized recommendation of EEK.

The current internet model supported by Web 2.0 technology and user-driven content dramatically improves the way of EEK accumulation and also realizes the process of self-organizational knowledge accumulation on an open platform. This paper studies the mechanism and technology of EEK management, and the accumulation mechanism of EEK mentioned in this paper is based on Wiki platform.

2 Related Works on Wiki

The users of Wiki platform are groups of individuals sharing the same hobbies and interests, or working in the same fields. Thus, they create and accumulate knowledge together in an open and collaborative manner. Wiki technology is one of the representative knowledge management tools, which provides a self-evolution method to obtain the wisdom of the cluster [1]. Therefore, based on Wiki technology, it is convenient for the knowledge-based enterprises or departments to create, edit, browse the knowledge.

The original working mechanism of Wiki can be defined as follows: any user is allowed to create a new structuralized knowledge item, which can be edited and modified by another user with permission of the platform. And Wiki system records the operations such as (create, modify) on the knowledge items and share the new version in the platform.

The major problems are found when Wiki is applied for enterprise knowledge management. (1) As for the content, the quality of knowledge is poor; (2) As for the accumulation, the employees’ initiative to contribute knowledge item is not strong; (3) As for the knowledge diffusion, the enterprises don’t have an effective and personalized mechanism to recommend knowledge.

Ding et al. pointed out that it is difficult for ordinary Wiki users to find the topics of interest or participate in the creation and contribution. And the expired contents on Wiki is still lack of updating mechanism. Therefore, enterprises still need to strengthen the knowledge accumulation and knowledge maintenance when using wiki [2].

Hwang et al. tried to solve the semantic conflicts when different users edited Wiki and proposed four dimensions of dynamic evolutions of knowledge [3].

Mariano et al. suggested a framework called fortunata to simplify the creation of context-based semantic web. Based on this framework, users can quickly create and edit knowledge items without the needs for advanced computer skills so they can promote knowledge reuse and interaction between creators through two application plugins based on fortunata [4].

To solve the maintenance problem of wiki’s engine in the enterprise, Gorka et al. put forward to establish topic knowledge map through keyword nodes on the wiki, and reconstruct the map to complete the maintenance of enterprise’s wiki based on context [5].

By combining semantic Wiki with predefined task ontology, defining and maintaining ontology, Baumeister et al. use the semantic wiki in medical emergency decision-making system, so that the decision-making system has an adaptive reasoning process, thus solving the problem [6].

Jung proposed a semantic wiki knowledge management system based on central wiki ontology, which can collect as many organized knowledge resources as possible, and continuously update and maintain the knowledge contexts. It can not only capture knowledge resources in language, but also capture conceptual structure effectively from multiple users, and integrate the captured new resources into knowledge management system [7].

WikiGenes [8, 9] and Knol [10] are two types of Wiki systems that record and identify the identity of knowledge revisers on the Wiki platform and increase the user’s confidence in Wiki knowledge by evaluating the authority of the user’s contents. In this way, the wiki is applied to the authoritative research field.

Many studies have proposed methods to improve the quality of Wiki contents. And an expert matching algorithm based on forwarding feedback neural network is used to find the most suitable modifier for the quality of Wiki content [1]. The characteristics of knowledge contents and users’ behaviors are considered synthetically, and the effect of knowledge quality improvement is analyzed by simulation.

Above all, scholars around the world have combined the process and management concept of knowledge management based on the characteristics of an open source-Wiki platform, aiming at the application of knowledge management in enterprises. Most of the research aimed at the problem that the knowledge quality of Wiki platform is poor, and put forward the idea of applying Wiki to the practice of enterprises’ empirical knowledge management under the premise of improving the knowledge quality.

3 The Novel Wiki Mechanism of Engineering Empirical Knowledge Management

3.1 The Structure of the Novel Wiki Mechanism

The original accumulation method of EEK can be described as follows: the engineers produce the documents for both successful and failed cases, which are stored either as electronic documents in the intranet or as hard copies in the reference room in order to be shared [4]. Thus, the conventional method increases the difficulties of inaccessibility and decreases the comprehensibility of EEK; also the EEK cannot be updated in time. In addition, if some incorrect concepts or even logical errors are contained in user’s description of experience, the individuals will be less inclined to the use of EEK. Due to the original method, the utilization of enterprises’ EEK accumulated in a long-term is rather low. Therefore, the requirement for improving the recommendation mechanism of enterprises’ empirical knowledge emerges.

In order to obtain the EEK of high quality and provide the employees with an easier access to the EEK, enterprises are supposed to build a knowledge accumulation mechanism supported by the collaboration of multi-disciplinary knowledge workers, and also be responsible for informing the domain experts to modify and verify this mechanism accurately and timely.

Based on Wiki, this paper studies the mechanism and technology of EEK management. Wiki stress great importance of user participation; thus the community mainly built by its users allows the individuals sharing the same interests and the groups majored in similar specialties to create and accumulate knowledge in a collaborative way (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Structure of the novel Wiki mechanism

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Besides the basic functions of the original mechanism, the novel Wiki mechanism can collect the revision suggestion and feedback from users, and reflect their interests in a particular item. Based on that, novel Wiki mechanism can expand other new functions.

3.2 The Characteristics of the Novel Wiki Mechanism

The basic functions of original Wiki mainly focuses on the accumulation processes of primary knowledge, transforming the unstructured EEK into the semi-structured one, which cannot form a closed loop of knowledge accumulation.

The novel Wiki mechanism retains the basic functions of the original Wiki mechanism, improves the knowledge accumulation, and expands a series of new functions, thereby refining the processes of experiential knowledge management and facilitating knowledge sharing. The function modules of novel Wiki mechanism are shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2.
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Function modules of novel Wiki mechanism

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Compared with the original Wiki mechanism, the novel mechanism implements the function mainly on account of the user participation. Specifically, the novel mechanism collects the feedback and advice from users by the evaluation module, which can reflect users’ interests in a particular item. Therefore, the user evaluation module is regarded as a prerequisite for the novel Wiki mechanism. On the DreamWeaver8.0, the PHP language is used to display the evaluation module as well as realize the statistical functions on the Media Wiki platform.

The goal of novel Wiki mechanism for knowledge management is to achieve better utilization of knowledge. As for the functionality, the novel Wiki mechanism not only includes but also extends the basic operations and functions of the original one. For example, the new functions of knowledge navigation, knowledge query, and knowledge use have been added. With regard to the structure of EEK, different from the original mechanism, the results of knowledge accumulation in the novel Wiki mechanism are structured EEK (Table 1).

Table 1. Comparison between the novel Wiki mechanism and the original one
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On Wiki platform, the enterprise engineers can create and accumulate EEKs, and the lifecycle of a piece of EEK including the knowledge acquisition, organization, improvement and sharing. The scattered EEKs will firstly be organized and classified into a structured form; each item will undergo several revisions to achieve higher quality; once up to the standard, the piece of EEK will be published and shared.

The new Wiki mechanism is based on the original basis of considering the score of the user group, which is regarded as a statistical measure to judge the quality of the item. However, under this new mechanism, assessing the quality of a piece of EEK is merely based on the rating of the item judged by all the users, which can be easily influenced by artificial factors. Also, there is no guarantee that the quality of the changed item is better than the previous one.

Therefore, the expert recommendation should be promoted by recommending the domain experts to modify the items on Media Wiki platform, thereby enhancing the knowledge quality and improving the accumulation efficiency. The knowledge accumulation mechanism in the New Wiki platform is shown in Fig. 3.

Fig. 3.
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Knowledge accumulation mechanism in the New Wiki platform

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In the new Wiki platform, the history of item creation and modification can be seen by all users on the platform, when a piece of EEK is created and submitted, or an existing item is modified. Additionally, the users who have the permission can edit these existing EEKs for times to ensure the high quality of the item. If the quality of an item has left much to be desired, the expert recommendation system can find the most suitable user to modify and check this item.

Once a user is selected as the domain expert according to the algorithm of this paper, he/she will be recommended to improve the quality of EEK. The process of “recommending experts to modify items” may be repeated many times until the piece of incomplete EEK reaches its expected quality. Only at this point can the piece of EEK be shared and utilized by enterprise engineers.

Generally, the original Wiki mechanism can realize the processes of knowledge organization, improvement, and sharing, yet there are some differences between the original and novel mechanism with regard to the accumulation of EEK: (1) the knowledge improvement process under the original one can only rely on the user’s independent modification, but it is unknown whether the revised version quality is better; (2) the knowledge sharing process of the original Wiki is carried out at the same time as knowledge creation is completed, and it does not guarantee that the quality of knowledge has met the standard; (3) original wiki cannot receive users’ feedback, although all users have the permission to modify the knowledge items created by other users, in fact, the users’ participation in the platform and their enthusiasm to modify the items are rather low.

4 Conclusion

The mechanism of knowledge accumulation is the prerequisite of the expert recommendation system. On the one hand, in order to take full advantages of the expert recommendation system, it requires a large number of extensive knowledge items as well as high user participation. Open mode and operability are the main characteristics of the Media Wiki, and this management mode only not accelerates the accumulation of EEK, but also standardized the organization of EEK. On the other hand, in order to ensure that the quality of the revised version is better than the previous one, two aspects of user information are worthy of consideration: the correlation between user’s knowledgeability and item knowledge, and the user’s authority in the user group. The knowledgeability includes user’s professional expertise and user’s knowledge proficiency. As for the user authority, it can be evaluated by the user’s interaction and evaluation on the platform. The accumulation mechanism of EEK on the Media Wiki can also support the establishment of the information system of user’s knowledgeability.