A computing curriculum wiki : analysis and modelling using the MAS-CommonKADS agent-oriented methodology.

Curriculum development, maintenance and management are time-consuming and labour-intensive activities resulting from countless feedback-rework cycles. The frequency of such activities tends to increase owing to the accelerated nature of advances in Computing. It is proposed that an existing Computing Ontology be adapted to facilitate these activities by developing a common vocabulary for all Computing disciplines to realize an online Curriculum Wiki facility. The operations of the Wiki would be implemented through ontological agents. This article presents insights into the modelling process of various user-initiated Wiki tasks using the MAS-CommonKADS Agent-Oriented Methodology

Role of affect and task category-knowledge sharing tools fit on behavioural intention to use KS tools among knowledge workers

Knowledge sharing is an essential practice by organizations of the 21st century. To leverage on knowledge sharing activities and cultivate a knowledge based ecosystem, organizations have invested and deployed many types of Knowledge Sharing tools (KS tools). KS tools allow knowledge workers to share and use knowledge in organizations. The low usage of KS tools justify the need to study the usage and also the intention to use these tools in organizations particularly among knowledge workers. In addition, the decline of Knowledge Economy Index (KEI) and Knowledge Index (KI) for Malaysia showed that knowledge sharing and knowledge contribution in education, innovation, and ICT are deteriorating. The need to investigate knowledge workers' intention to use knowledge sharing tools to support knowledge practices seems a reasonable research goal. In this research, the focus is on the behavioral intention of knowledge workers to use KS tools among knowledge workers in Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) status organizations. MSC-status organizations play a key role that contributes to the national KEI and KI for Malaysia. The main objective of this study is to identify factors that influence the intention to use KS tools among knowledge workers. In an attempt to provide answers to the research objective, Affective Technology Acceptance Model (A.T.A Model) is developed to examine the antecedents that influence the attitude and behavioral intention of the knowledge workers to use KS tools in their day-to-day tasks. The A.T.A Model integrates Technology Acceptance Model with Task-Technology Fit to examine the acceptance of technology by hypothesize fit between Task Category and KS tools to Behavioral Intention to use KS tools. The proposed research model also includes the role of affect drawing from theories by Russell’s Circumplex of Affect and Watson, Clark and Tellegen’s Consensual Model of Affect into the propose model. The A.T.A model also considers organizational factors and motivational factors that influence the Behavioral Intention to use KS tools among knowledge workers. Quantitative method using survey approach is adopted to collect data from respondents. The proposed A.T.A model is empirically examined using two hundred ninety five (295) respondents who comprised of knowledge workers from a sampling frame of two thousand five hundred and five (2505) knowledge workers in twenty-three (23) MSC-status organizations that participated in this research. The outcomes of the analysis support the overall structure of the model whereby sixteen (16) of the twenty two (22) hypothesis are supported. The Behavioral Intention to use KS tools is supported and explained by knowledge workers' Attitude, Task-Category and KS tools fit, Positive Affect and Trust. In this research, Attitude has the highest impact on Behavioral Intention, followed by Task Category-KS tools fit, Positive Affect and Trust. On the other hand, Negative Affect influences Behavioral Intention knowledge workers for three (3) different points in time only ("At the Moment", "Past Few Days", and "Past Few Weeks"). However, Extrinsic and Intrinsic Rewards are found to have no influence on Behavioral Intention to use KS tools. The findings highlighted that change in Positive Affect is able to create a positive impact in Behavioral Intention of knowledge workers to use KS tools besides Attitude and TCK fit. The findings highlighted that Positive Affect has an influence on Perceived Usefulness, but Negative Affect has no influence on it. However, both Positive and Negative Affect have an influence on Perceived Ease of Use. The results also found that Task Category KS tools fit influences Behavioral Intention significantly. This is consistent with past research, which claimed that integrating Task Category-KS tools fit to acceptance model is able to provide better explanation on the intention of individuals to use KS tools. On the contrary, this research found Extrinsic and Intrinsic Rewards, and Management Support have no significant relationship with Behavioral Intention to used KS tools in the proposed A.T.A model. Overall, the results of this study contribute to the literature of technology acceptance by shedding light on the behavioral intention to use KS tools among knowledge workers

A Study on the perception of POKM as the organizational knowledge sharing enabler

Knowledge is asset to many knowledge-driven companies in a globally competitive business eco-system. Companies that are able to capture and reuse knowledge efficiently claim that higher quality products and services can be realized in lower cost and time. Researches on factors that motivate successful knowledge practices using Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) have been well investigated. However, factors on people, organization and technology may vary for organizations of different sizes in countries with different culture. In this study, the case organization failed to achieve some of the goals such as knowledge sharing among employees and creation of new skills and knowledge. This research carried out a detailed study on POKM, a tailored made KMS used by a Malaysian IT Shared Services Company. This study investigates the perception of knowledge workers toward technological characteristics of POKM. The study examines the POKM system quality, perception of POKM user interface, quality of content management offered by POKM, POKM functions, user satisfaction toward POKM and perceived POKM benefit among knowledge workers. The research investigates a IT Shared Services Company in Malaysia. Interview with knowledge workers in the organization takes place before questionnaire survey is distributed to all the participants. This paper presents an in-depth analysis on the interviewees’ responses. The outcome of the interview content is used as the basis to design the questionnaire survey. The outcomes of the research show that the quality of POKM is stable, easy to use and organization of the content is rated good. However, POKM has poor response time and search capability. The content is found to be difficult to locate in the POKM but most participants agree that knowledge stored in the POKM is helpful, can be accessed anytime and anywhere and useful for their day-to-day job. As for the user interface, POKM is not very pleasant to use with a weak set of functions and features in particular social networking feature is not available. For user satisfaction towards POKM, it is shown that users are not satisfied with the efficiency and effectiveness of the systems. However, employees generally are satisfied with ease of access and download features. In term of perceived POKM benefits, users agree that POKM is an enabler for acquiring new knowledge and innovative ideas, managing and storing knowledge, and accomplishing tasks more efficiently. Lastly, knowledge users agree that POKM functions enable knowledge networking, sharing, and creation in the organizatio

Strategies to improve knowledge sharing in trading construction organization

In this present economy that is wholly centered on knowledge and skill, knowledge sharing (KS) is gradually regarded as an important factor in organizational effectiveness and an innovative mechanism to cope with challenges [1]. Therefore, for organizations to create new knowledge sharing strategies are essentials to align to the knowledge economy to overcome business challenges [2, 3]. A preliminary investigation was conducted by focusing on the Critical Success Factors (CSF) to promote knowledge sharing at the organizational level and to examine the employees’ perception towards the types of knowledge sharing tools in the construction trading industry. This paper proposes several dimensions for knowledge strategy to manage knowledge assets that can be used as the key foundation to many organizations t

A study on the knowledge implementation strategy and its influence on the knowledge sharing attitude among knowledge workers and individual job performance

Knowledge is asset that empowers individual and organizations to stay competitive in a borderless business world. For organizations that successfully deploy knowledge sharing and reuse, they have claimed to have observed job performance improvement. Even though the success or failure of KM implementation have been aggressively investigated by researchers, nevertheless, besides factors such as culture, business strategy, size, capacity and needs of organizations, KM strategy may vary depending on the organizations’ eco-system. Hence, there is a need to investigate organizations operate in Malaysian to understand influences of KM strategy and its influence to knowledge sharing atttitude among knowledge workers in the organizations. And the effect of KM strategy and knowledge sharing atttitude on individual job performance. The research subjects are IT related companies in Malaysia that practise knowledge sharing. MSC status companies will be invited to participate. Questionnaire will be sent to these companies to solicit responses.Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) will be adopted as analysis technique to analyze the responses from research subjects that take part. In this research, a selected group of companies in Kuala Lumpur/Selangor/Klang Valley will be interviewed to collect their views for qualitative analysis. Campbell Job Performance Theory will be used in the research to evaluate performance of knowledge workers in organizations. Questionnaire survey will be circulated to knowledge workers to collect their responses. The outcomes of the research provides a better understanding of the relationships between KM implementation strategy, knowledge sharing attitude, and individual job performance of knowledge workers

A qualitative investigation on factors that influence knowledge sharing in organizations

Factors that influence knowledge sharing among knowledge workers in organizations can seriously affect performance and productivity because poor understanding of these factors can de-motivate knowledge sharing culture and attitude in the organizations The aim of this investigation is to study the factors that influence knowledge sharing in organization and the relationship between those factors. The study looks at six factors: Information Technology, Learning Strategy, Outcome Expectations, Trust, Reward and the role of affect in this research. The role of Affect is introduced into this research base on strong evidence highlighted by many related works that support the significance of affect that can influence knowledge sharing in organizations. This research interviewed 13 individuals from a total of five (5) participating organizations to collect their views on questions designed to solicit important details pertaining to factors discussed above. The outcomes of our findings highlight that the Information Technology Use on KS tools functions need to be more intuitively interesting. As for Learning strategy, participants express that they are happy to share knowledge on the job with some say there is a need to have proper learning strategies in the organizations. On the Reward, interviewees mostly agree that rewards are motivator. On Trust, findings highlight that policy and procedures, validation and source of the information are three key considerations that provide the level of trust on the knowledge obtained and reliability. As for the element of affect, most of the participants highlight that if they are emotionally unpleasant they either provide very little responses on queries forwarded to them, don’t entertain colleagues, or postpone their responses

Voice of customers: Text analysis of hotel customer reviews (cleanliness, overall environment & value for money)

The rise of the Internet has caused many changes on our daily lives. Internet has drastically changed the way we live our life, the way we spend our holidays, how we communicate with each other daily, and how we purchase products. The growth of Internet amongst consumer has generated content on the Internet by sources such as social media, review website, blogs, product fan page and many more. This has lead on to a new way of planning a holiday or looking for a suitable hotel to stay. Hence, hotel reviews websites have become a popular platform for customers to share their experiences, reviews, and recommendations on hotels, which they have visited. In Malaysia, hotel industry has been one of the most important economic growths of the country. The primary goal of a hotel is to satisfy customers, to be able to provide a high quality of service, and provide customers with a memorable experience whilst staying at the hotel. The purpose of this study is to understand and identify the range of factors, which may contribute to the satisfaction of customers as well as through expectations. Data was collected from online review websites such as Trip Advisor. Text analytics are used to analyze the contents collected

Using two-tier bitwise interest oriented QRP data structure for high clustering through interest similarity in SWB P2P systems

The concept of “Small-World” paradigm has been used by many peer-to-peer (P2P) systems to achieve high clustering and low number of hops to arrive to its desired target. This approach intends to improve performance of P2P systems. The Small world concept requires that the architecture of a P2P system to achieve high cluster coefficient and low average hop between any two randomly chosen peers. In this research, we propose an enhanced hierarchical overlay network by incorporating the concept of Small world into the base hierarchical architecture. This research adopts the Query Routing Protocol (QRP) data structure of a hierarchical P2P network by storing the interest information of files in the leaf peers in the network. The QRP in the leaf peers will be aggregated and propagated to the SuperPeer so that interest information could be used to form short-range, medium-range and long-range links with other SuperPeers to achieve low average hop. As peers join and leave the network, a proposed rewiring protocol is used to ensure peers are clustered by interest to form high clustering coefficient so that search activities are yielding higher relevance results in a more predictable fashion. We simulated the porposed small world P2P using test scenarios to evaluate recall rate of the small world P2P system. Our simulated results evaluate and benchmark our proposed Small-World Bee (SWB) overlay network with iCluster [3], Firework Query Model [5] and Limewire [1] to assess performance obtained and goals achieved in the research work so that future research directions could be planned

GOPE: A MVC driven mobile framework using HTML5 for pervasive device container

Mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets have become part of our life these days. Well designed mobile applications for business specific mobile commerce are still very lacking. GOPE is designed to allow group-buy consumers to access to an online group-buy commerce portal with ease, efficiency and flexible functional needs. The GOPE mobile application offers few key features: location selecting option, deals viewing and selecting option, deals sharing, mobile log in, payment on-the -move, and user account management. The proposed mobile framework is designed using Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern with ‘hoke’ to enrich the group buy flexible functional requirements. The GOPE MVC ‘hoke’ technique has successfully fulfill the objective of the project. The GOPE prototype has been tested with a select group of testers and it has demonstrated to have achieved goals of the project

A study on the element of sentiment toward knowledge sharing among knowledge workers in a virtual CoP

Ever since the usage of alternative media has grown tremendously, it was seen that the increasing amount of interactive online sites that are categorized as Web 2.0 systems has changed the communication and collaboration among knowledge workers. These systems provide greater interactivity and higher user-generated content. Social networking site is one type of online platforms that allow people to collaborate and communicate through a variety of services for social purposes (Broughton, Higgins, Hicks, & Cox, 2009). These high-flying social networking sites are driving new forms of social interaction, allowing users to intermingle and cooperate with each other in a social media dialogue nowadays by swapping ideas or posting updates and comments. It is crucial to comprehend how social relationships affect the content share between each knowledge worker in a virtual world. This project investigates how work and friend relationships can influence the utilization of social media systems for knowledge sharing. The effect of the element of sentiment among knowledge workers in a virtual Community of Practice (CoP) as they send and receive messages with their peers will be studied in this research. Different forms of emotion from knowledge workers will be investigated in this study in the workplace. A proposed research model will be proposed. A research framework will be outlined and qualitative and quantitative analysis will be used to analyze the research results