Since 1996 the NWAIAG/AKRI has been exploring a way to visualise organisational knowledge resources.
With the help of large UK companies such as Rolls-Royce and BAe Systems, the AKRI under the direction of Dr John L Gordon has developed a methodology and a software tool KST, aimed specifically at producing a “Knowledge Structure Map” (KSM) which shows clearly a hierarchy of knowledge nodes arranged in a pre-requisite dependency network. The knowledge represented on the map is organised in the way that a human expert would acquire this knowledge, by learning dependency. This means showing knowledge that would be expected to be known before it would be possible to understand some new piece of knowledge.
During the development of a KSM using KST, parameters pertaining to each individual knowledge node are elicited concerning Importance to the knowledge area, Difficulty to Replace, Acquisition method (Study : Experience balance) and Known-By (%). Several text parameters are also elicited including Title, Definition, Summary and Links to further Information. KST is capable of analysing these and presenting results and reports derived from them. A recent addition to KST is the ability to export a representation of a KSM as XML data.
Although KST has proved to be an invaluable tool for the elicitation and analysis of Knowledge Structure Maps it is arguably not the best tool for viewing the information and allowing that information to be disseminated to multiple users. The KST environment is designed for editing KSM’s. Allowing those who do not know how to (or have no need to) edit KSM’s would compromise the validity of the knowledge study. KST is also written in LISP which is not the best environment for developing a graphical delivery system.
To meet the shortcomings of KST in terms of delivery, a new software project under the working title “Corax” is being developed at the AKRI to explore the possibilities of providing an information delivery system that allows knowledge managers to disseminate KSM’s without enabling end users to change the map. Although the main purpose of Corax is to be an information delivery system for a KSM analysis of a knowledge area it can also by seen that Corax represents an extension of the AKRI’s SPIKE e-learning tool in that it provides meta-information about the structure of the learning area to complement the actual information to be learnt. SPIKE explored the usage of a KSM as a learning tool and has been available on the AKRI website for evaluation and experimentation. Over a period of 3 years SPIKE has evolved from a “hand built” time hungry development to one where dynamic maps from XML data can now be built instantaneously. Corax now builds maps dynamically from the Flash optimised XML exported by KST effectively making Corax a shell containing no data in itself.
Corax is developed using Macromedia Flash for it’s ease and speed of development of vector map based graphical interfaces and relatively powerful object oriented programming language (Actionscript 2). Although technically a non-standard (W3C) technology, Flash has a great degree of ubiquity across the WWW which makes it a useful platform for delivery across the internet or intranets. Flash also allows the export of an executable file complete with Flash Player runtime for CD-ROM delivery. This is useful for situations such as when company networks will not allow the Flash web player plugin to download.