Objectives

• Explain the user and task-adapted approach used to develop knowledge taxonomies within an LIS context;
• Describe how unstructured knowledge can be organized for easy storage, retrieval and sharing at the individual, community and organizational levels;
• Define the different approaches to knowledge taxonomies for explicit and tacit forms of knowledge;
• Describe the technological landscape of taxonomy software;

Content

Week 1 Introduction to Knowledge Taxonomies: a brief history,

definitions of key concepts, components of knowledge taxonomies; links to information systems and information professionals.

Week 2 Knowledge Types: different conceptual levels of knowledge;

Nonaka and Takeuchi’s tacit/explicit typology; Woo’s tacit/explicit/ cultural knowledge typology; Wiig’s knowledge typology matrix

Week 3 How We Organize Knowledge: conceptual chunking, schemas, mental models, schemas, scripts, episodes, events, routines;

Week 4 Classification and Categorization of Organizational Knowledge:

glossaries, gazetteers, dictionaries, yellow pages or expertise location directories; concept hierarchies; taxonomies; categorization schemes, classification schemes; description of knowledge at different levels of detail;

Week 5 Thanksgiving – no class

Week 6 Explicit Knowledge Taxonomies: thesauri, semantic

networks, ontologies; knowledge inventories, lessons learned.

Week 7 Study Break

Week 8 Explicit Taxonomy and Search: browsing vs. searching; research

results and their implications for taxonomy development; online information retrieval, Bloom’s taxonomy of learning objectives, task analysis approaches, personalization technologies.

Week 9 Determining Taxonomy Software Requirements: recall,

Relevancy and precision; hierarchies; bottom-up or top-down; clustering; pattern matching; controlled vocabulary and thesauri; example-based; neural networks; spiders.

Week 10 Student Presentations

Week 11 Tacit Knowledge Taxonomy Development Process: development

of taxonomy structure; categorization of multimedia content; presentation of content; monitoring new input and maintaining knowledge assets.

Week 12 Social Nature of Knowledge: social construction of meaning, role

of social networks in knowledge flow, social or peer-based knowledge taxonomies; shared context creation and definition; socially defined domain and language.

Week 13 Broadband Requirements of Tacit Knowledge: multimedia

content, content-based image retrieval, video capture of knowledge, dynamic/evolving knowledge processes, subjective knowledge/opinions/judgments, multifaceted knowledge organization.

Week 14 Personal Knowledge Management (PKM): the future of

knowledge taxonomies?