Discussion, challenges and proposed solution on knowledge value generation. (FInES Cluster Meeting, December 2012)

1. FInES Cluster Meeting
Knowledge Value Generation
Session #3
Contact Point: Eva Coscia
Rapporteur: Michele Missikoff

2. Framing
Interested Projects (open list)
BIVEE, MSEE, COIN, Premanus, Imagine,
ExtremeFactories, EPES, NisB, Comvantage,
Venture Gate, Unite, Ensemble.
Discussion seeds
• Collaborative Intelligence;
• semantic knowledge management;
• monitoring and governance and early detection
methods in dispersed knowledge environments;
• knowledge sharing; business intelligence
automation

3. List of Challenges 1/5
Key Challenges: focus on K usage and Pragmatics
• Dynamicity of knowledge and fuzziness
– We need to survive with (partially) incorrect,
incomplete knowledge
– Accept more imprecision / incompleteness ...to be
managed with probability models (Bayesian,
Marcovian, ...)
• Semantic enrichment of business and production
– Use of ontologies to annotate business entities,
components, subsystems, ...
• Flexibility vs Guidance
– Rigid, prescriptive patterns and guidelines may not be
widely applicable and maintanable, but the absence
of patterns and guidelines will lead to inefficiencies
and chaos

4. LoC 2/5
• Quality vs value of knowledge.
– Relevance depends on
timeliness, recipients, ‘packaging’, ...
– Errors: false positive, false negative, right solution to the
wrong problem (due to the problem of understanding also
the problem)
– How can we survive with Faulty Knowledge?
(unavoidable, btw)
– Value is connected to impact
– Impact is connected to the correct usage (by the right
actors, in the right moment, on the right problem and
domain), that depends on the way K is applied
– We need people to change
• their perception towards knowledge, seen as a primary value for
enterprises, to be systematically managed as a production means
• the way they interact and communicate

5. LoC 3/5
• Knowledge acquisition
– bottom-up (inductive) from reality vs top-down from
conceptualization
– knowledge sources:
• Active K sources: people (experts), objects, computers
• Passive K sources: documents, databases and various
repositories, various phenomena, ...
– explicit (entities expressing their knowledge)
– implicit (actors observing phenomena and invoved
entities, to extract knowledge)
– Endorsement, for reliability, traceability, non
repudiation
– Emergence and recognition of given phenomena
– collaborative intelligence

6. LoC 4/5
• Knowlege representation and organization
– From informal to formal: video, textual
documents, databases, terminological
resources, RDF, OWL, ...
• Knowledge evolution
• Harmonization, mapping, integration of K from
different sources.
– Interoperability needs knowledge, a lot of knowledge
about the two (or more) interoperating actors
– Sustainable Interoperability, since things change
• knowledge diffusion
– upon request, to requestor
– proactively sent, to needy destination (even if they
don’t know)

7. LoC 5/5
Verification and assessment
• knowledge usage, how to improve.
• verification of impact (is the available knowledge
actually used by people?)
• Knowledge to manage the transitions, rather
than the stable situation
• Common understanding vs articulation of diverse
opinions:
• Multiculturalism: towards constellations of
ontologies rather that universal ontologies.
• Science Base: to provide a robust foundation to
the proposed solutions

8. Solutions???
• Knowledge: the oil of the Third Millennium
• Since Lisbon 2010, the EC has indicated that
the future of Europe will be Knowledge
• We need to converge, within the FInES Cluster,
on common models, tools and methods
Proposal
• Organise a focused Workshop on Knowledge
Value for FInES