The design and evaluation of EKE, a semi-automated email knowledge extraction tool

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Knowledge Management Research and Practice. The definitive publisher-authenticated version, TEDMORI, S. and JACKSON, T., 2012. The design and evaluation of EKE, a semi-automated email knowledge extraction tool. Knowledge Management Research and Practice, 10 (1), pp. 79 - 88 is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/kmrp.2011.40This paper presents an approach to locating experts within organisations through the use of the indispensable communication medium and source of information, email. The approach was realised through the email expert locator architecture developed by the authors, which uses email content in the modelling of individuals' expertise profiles. The approach has been applied to a real-world application, EKE, and evaluated using focus group sessions and system trials. In this work, the authors report the findings obtained from the focus groups sessions. The aim of the sessions was to obtain information about the participants' perceptions, opinions, underlying attitudes, and recommendations with regard to the notion of exploiting email content for expertise profiling. The paper provides a review of the various approaches to expertise location that have been developed and highlights the end-users' perspectives on the usability and functionality of EKE and the socio-ethical challenges raised by its adoption from an industrial perspective. © 2012 Operational Research Society. All rights reserved

Locating knowledge sources through key-phrase extraction

There are a large number of tasks for which keyphrases can be useful. Manually identifying keyphrases can be a tedious and time consuming process that requires expertise, but if automated could save time and aid in creating metadata that could be used to locate knowledge sources. In this paper, the authors present an automated process for keyphrase extraction from email messages. The process enables users to find other people who might hold the knowledge they require from information communicated via the email system. The effectiveness of the extraction system is tested and compared against other extraction systems and the overall value of extracting information from email explored

Information seeking behaviour of a UK police force

We have reached an age of information overload. It is also an age of information empowerment, an age where people are regularly bombarded with information. People have access to far more information than they can possibly handle. Information plays a vital role in people’s lives, as they are constantly challenged to locate the right information that they need in order to make decisions and to complete their tasks. Unfortunately, people often have difficulties in locating relevant information. Early studies on information seeking behaviour show that people searching for information prefer asking other people for advice than searching through a manual. The issue becomes then a matter of searching for the right person. This has led to interest in systems, which connect people to others by making people with the necessary expertise available to those who need it, when they need it. This study aims to undertake a baseline review of how UK police force employees work and in turn provide a better understanding of how to develop IT systems that will support employees in their daily activities. It documents the analysis of a questionnaire survey that looks at how individuals at Leicestershire Constabulary seek information and how they share information once it’s located, in order to determine if an expert locator system would work at their organisation. Results show that officers have difficulties when searching for information. The results give an estimate of the amount of searching time that officers think could be saved by officers if they know where to look for the relevant information and the reasons behind the time being wasted. Moreover, results show that email remains to be the most intensely utilised communication medium, used to help generate, organise, share, or leverage knowledge within the organisation. Although specific websites and online databases were the first sources to be consulted by most officers when searching for information, officers frequently query other peers for references.. The overall results suggest that embracing the concept of an expertise locator at Leicestershire Constabulary could lead to positive outcomes