Elsevier

Computers in Human Behavior

Volume 30, January 2014, Pages 753-759
Computers in Human Behavior

Information management from social and documentary sources in organizations

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.10.033Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We have designed an ontology describing a knowledge ecosystem.

  • Our ontology permits to index both documentary and social media resources.

  • Our ontology allows users of the ecosystem to organize themselves into free groups.

  • We build a prototype, which implements our ontology.

  • We test the prototype with students of an university course.

Abstract

The wide adoption of social and connected tools in organizations leads them to think again about their behavior regarding how they manage their resources. They now consider the resources users can produce on various social media and how correctly index them in the organization knowledge base. We present in this paper the model of a digital ecosystem, which permits the indexing of either documentary resources or those produced on a social platform with the help of an ontology.

Introduction

Social networks drain more and more users online. Whether for entertainment, information finding or personal watch, new habits of resources production or sharing have emerged.

The organizations are aware of the opportunities that may present these new habits in their collaborative or activities or watch. Thus, they are increasingly interested in social networks and the deployment of such digital tools in organizations accelerates.

However, most current products used by organization are not optimal. They are rarely or poorly integrated with existing infrastructure. This results in a scattering of information across different tools, which do not communicate with each other.

Organizations are therefore looking for a way to effectively use these information sources and make them interact with their traditional knowledge bases. Enabling organizations to better manage all of their resources by indexing them with a single frame of references, regardless of their mode of creation, is a key to improve decision-making at all levels. We present in this paper a semantic model of a digital knowledge ecosystem and its prototype. This system allows the indexing of the organization’s resources coming either from its documentary bases or users interactions on a digital social network.

We will return in Section 2 on the relevance of integrating social tools to the other Information Services (ISs) of an organization and how these tools could be viewed as a knowledge ecosystem, favorable to decision making. We then present, in Section 3, the design of a digital ecosystem. Before concluding, Section 4 presents a use of the prototype and the first results we obtained.

Section snippets

People as information vector

The control of information is essential for organizations, which have always tried to capture and index it so one can easily use it later. This is a strategic issue in a changing world (Ermine, 2000, Waltz, 2003). Controlling its own information is a springboard for innovation and permit to persist in a very competitive market.

All this information enables the organization to maintain access to its own knowledge, the knowledge brought by its employees. This business knowledge can be found into

The MEMORAe approach

The MEMORAe approach proposes a theoretical model (Section 3.1) and a platform for collaboration and knowledge management for organizations (Section 3.2). The main contribution of this approach is to allow the indexing of all types of resources around a semantic frame of references presented to the user as a concepts map.

Our works are integrated into the MEMORAe approach. They extend its model and features, such as wikis, forums, or shared calendars (Leblanc and Abel, 2008, Leblanc et al., 2010

A technological watch

The prototype we developed had been used by students for a course taught at the University of Technology in Compiégne (UTC). The course subject was about the tools and technologies involved in knowledge management. During the four months of the 2012 autumn semester, about forty students had done a technological watch on a given topic. First, they had to define the perimeter of their researches with the mean of an ontology. This ontology helps them to define the key concepts of their watch.

Conclusion

We have seen in this article the importance of being able to index with a single frame of references documentary resources and those produced on an online social application and how this could be achieved by the deployment of a knowledge ecosystem inside organizations. The ontology we have developed allows us to represent the different types of resources and to index them with a single platform, what facilitates the knowledge management for an organization.

A prototype of this platform has also

Acknowledgement

This research is funded as part of a DGA-CIFRE thesis.

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