Knowledge management: the issue of multimedia contents

Knowledge Management is a very important topic in business and in academy research. There are many fields of applications for knowledge management, including cognitive science, sociology, management science, information science, knowledge engineering, artificial intelligence, and economics. Many studies on different aspects of Knowledge Management have been published, becoming common in the early 1990s. In this work, we want to represent Knowledge through a mixed-iterative approach, where top-down and bottom-up analyses of the knowledge domain which has to be represented are applied: these are typical approaches for this kind of problems. In this case, they are applied following an iterative approach which allows, through further refinements, for the efficient formalization able to represent the domain's knowledge of interest. We start from the concept of the “domain knowledge base”. The fundamental body of knowledge available on a domain is the knowledge valuable for the knowledge users. We need to represent and manage this knowledge, to define a formalization and codification of the knowledge in the domain. After this formalization we can manage this knowledge using knowledge repositories. In this thesis, we present four different formalization and management of knowledge for multimedia contents, using our proposed approach: 1. User Generated Contents from famous platform (Flickr, YouTube, etc.); 2. audio recordings regarding linguistic corpus and information added to that corpus with annotations; 3. knowledge associated with construction processes; 4. descriptions and reviews of Italian wines. The most important result we achieved with this thesis was the opportunity to make this disparaged knowledge available and manageable. In the current market, exploiting existing knowledge is a mainstream business, but in order to exploit it, one must be able to manage it first. As a token of this importance, not only about ten scientific publications, but most of all a number of industrial research projects, in partnership with ICT companies – one of which with a total value above one million Euros – stemmed from the studies discussed in this thesis

Smart mobility and public transport: Opportunities and challenges in rural and urban areas

n/

Incidence of predatory journals in computer science literature

Purpose One of the main tasks of a researcher is to properly communicate the results he obtained. The choice of the journal in which to publish the work is therefore very important. However, not all journals have suitable characteristics for a correct dissemination of scientific knowledge. Some publishers turn out to be unreliable and, against a payment, they publish whatever researchers propose. The authors call "predatory journals" these untrustworthy journals. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the incidence of predatory journals in computer science literature and present a tool that was developed for this purpose. Design/methodology/approach The authors focused their attention on editors, universities and publishers that are involved in this kind of publishing process. The starting point of their research is the list of scholarly open-access publishers and open-access stand-alone journals created by Jeffrey Beall. Specifically, they analysed the presence of predatory journals in the search results obtained from Google Scholar in the engineering and computer science fields. They also studied the change over time of such incidence in the articles published between 2011 and 2015. Findings The analysis shows that the phenomenon of predatory journals somehow decreased in 2015, probably due to a greater awareness of the risks related to the reputation of the authors. Originality/value We focused on computer science field, using a specific sample of queries. We developed a software to automatically make queries to the search engine, and to detect predatory journals, using Beall's list

A Review of Lean-Kanban Approaches in the Software Development

We present a review on the state-of-the-art of the adoption of a specific Agile Methodology (AM), the Lean-Kanban, in different software development contexts. Such approach requires to break down the software development process into smaller steps, which are implemented with the aid of a Kanban board. We study 14 different Kanban boards and we also examined how features are represented in the boards and compared 22 software tools for implementing virtual Kanban boards, analyzing also resources available on the web. We analyzed the main features of the Kanban boards actually used, the main activities defining the software development process, the content of the cards representing work units, and also the automation tools available for Kanban board management. Our survey shows that nor standard definitions of Kanban practices exist for the software development, neither specific practices for the Kanban board management have been rigorously defined, and thus Lean development standardization and improvement is still an unaccomplished task for software development

An Investigation of Approaches to Set Up a Kanban Board, and of Tools to Manage it

This paper presents a survey with the intent to address a series of issues of the Lean-Kanban approach in the software development, and specifically the guidelines and tools used to set-up a Kanban board. Following the Lean principles, a software process can be broken down into steps and managed with a Kanban approach. Despite the recent increase of interest on the subject, there is no standard definition of Kanban system for software development, and the specific practices of Kanban have not yet been rigorously defined. The purpose of this work is a rigorous analysis of the available information, through research questions and answers, to show the state-of the-art about how Kanban approach is presented and used, in particular those related to the Kanban board management, and to study how they are addressed in practice. We used the methods of Evidence-based software engineering, performing a systematic review of the available information. In our opinion, the information gathered might be very useful to people considering Kanban board adoption, and to the whole community of agile developers practicing Lean-Kanban system approach

Content Management in Digital Libraries

In recent years, the development of models to formalize knowledge has been studied and analysed. Many disciplines develop standardized formalization of knowledge, which domain experts can use to share information in the form of reusable knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to formalize knowledge through a mixed-iterative approach, applying a top-down and bottom-up analysis of the knowledge domain to represent. Our study is part of an industrial project being funded by the Autonomous Region of Sardinia, with the goal of implementing a web-based application with innovative functionalities in the field of semantic search and digital content management. We consider the case of Italian libraries, which have moved from holding mainly printed resources to a collection that includes also multimedia objects, such as music, databases, ebooks, audio sources, and websites, over the last decade

A New Approach for Knowledge Management and Optimization using an Open Source Repository

The Institutional Repositories (Irs) based on Open Archives represent one of the main free access tools for the results of scientific research, and their diffusion is continuously growing. In the context of the “Analytic Sound Archive of Sardinia” project, that aims to create an institutional archive with a linguistically annotated electronic corpus, this work proposes a new approach for management of knowledge using the tool Dspace (an open source software package developed in 2000 in the context of a joint project of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Hewlett-Packard): the purpose is to offer an original way to associate linguistic annotations (information associated to specific text portions) to the corpus by treating them as metadata, so as to insert and manage them in the archive of choice after formalizing them in XML. The formalization level of this approach allows for effective text retrievals through a metadata schema and easy, quick corpus interrogations, by formalizing linguistic annotation as a structured metadata schema. There is, thus, the need to have an efficient tool that could classify and store the vast amount of knowledge contained in an electronic corpus of spoken texts of Sardinian language, linguistically annotated at various levels, and that could allow a high usability in terms of ease of reference as well as ease of query and communication

The FAME Approach: an assessing methodology

In recent years the increasing of open source solutions extended the business opportunities for the IT companies but at the same time created problems for the choice and evaluation processes. For these reasons the need of approaches and tools to address this issue has become capital. We present FAME (Filter, Analyze, Measure and Evaluate), an iterative approach for open source software assessment, and an idea for a support tool for this methodology. In this paper we analyze the most interesting and important assessment methodologies and the FAME approach that derived by these, more heavyweight, proven approaches developed in a University research and consulting company environment, aims to match the needs of small organizations. The proposed approach has been used by FlossLab, the first spin-off of University of Cagliari, to select the best solutions. This tool can be useful to make easier the whole process, supporting the users in this choice by an interactive approach, particularly in the filtering and analysis phases

A Kanban-Based Methodology to Define Taxonomies and Folksonomies in KMS

Document management is not often handled appropriately by organisations, if at all. Despite that, and despite the lack of structure in documents, organisations must face regulations that require owning a document collection with semantic content. The technique based on taxonomies and folksonomies can easily produce an adequate semantic classification for documents. It requires an adequate setup among the domain experts that apply it. The approach we propose uses Lean Kanban to coordinate the phases of definition, validation and implementation of taxonomies and folksonomies. It helps organisations to create a semantic classification of existing document resources, making them ready to be used in ways that were not possible before. At the same time, it helps to improve the quality of work of the organisation itself, adding speed to document search