KSM 2009

Introduction & Motivation

Large monolithic knowledge management systems as the one-for-all KM solution have largely failed to live up to their expectations. In particular, they have failed

• to integrate into work practices of the individual, thus lacking adoption by the individual
• to adapt to different types and sizes of companies, different type of employees as well as changing requirements of those
• to acknowledge that knowledge management is not an isolated activity within a company, but rather an activity of "networked individuals”

In line with the trend towards modular service-oriented architectures, we can observe that knowledge management solutions increasingly adopt more modular approaches. However, these developments are usually merely a decomposition into software components without taking into account the user of such systems. But the notion of service goes beyond components; it usually assumes that the granularity of functionality as well as packaging is motivated by usage patterns (e.g., business processes) and not purely technical (software engineering) considerations.

This means that the shift from integrated knowledge management solutions towards knowledge services is not only a question of modularity, but also requires rethinking offer and demand (by knowledge workers) of such services. And it also requires a thorough understand of knowledge work and new conceptual foundations for its support (e.g., the knowledge maturing model by Maier & Schmidt or the seeding-evolutionary growth-reseeding model by Fischer) to identify basic knowledge services and their interplay, which constitutes another issue of service-orientation: combination or orchestration of different services to provide higher-level functionality. That is the real power of service-oriented approaches.

In the context of Web 2.0 (which in itself is a user-oriented approach to web applications where the social ecology is explicitly considered), the notion of mashups has emerged as an integration paradigm which is lightweight and easy such that:

• end-users themselves can combine different services (like aggregating and filtering feeds of content, calendar information etc.)
• applications and services can easily participate and offer those feeds

This goes beyond service-orientation (which is about empowering the enterprise to creating their own solutions without relying on vendor prepackaging) and realizes end-user empowerment as well.

A recent development in the related field of learning support is constituted by personal learning environments, replacing LMS similar to services and mashups replacing KMS. They envision a work environment of individual tools (e.g., for communication, sharing, awareness, collaboration, networking) that allow the individual for organizing her learning in a very personal way. They offer a construction set of small services to be configured by the individual user.

The workshop aims at bringing these strands of development of service-oriented approaches to supporting knowledge management and learning together to go one step further beyond the enthusiasm about Knowledge Management 2.0, which is essentially about social software for knowledge management. The scope of the workshop ranges from theoretical and conceptual foundations (which might come from various disciplines), methodical contributions up to technical prototype development and gathering experiences from evaluations.

• Theoretical and conceptual foundations of knowledge services and mash-ups
  • Notion of knowledge services and mashups
  • Theories and concepts of knowledge work
  • Requirements for knowledge services and mash-ups
• Knowledge Service and Mashup engineering
  • for personal knowledge management and learning (including personal learning environments)
  • for supporting communities and social networking
  • for organizational knowledge management
• Personalization and contextualization of services and mash-ups
  • Knowledge representations and models for services
  • Semantic models and metadata
• Knowledge Service Architectures and integration concepts
  • Lightweight mash-up approaches to the combination of different knowledge services
  • Semantic service descriptions
  • Evaluation of knowledge services and mash-ups

Important Dates

• October 31, 2008 Extended Deadline November 14, 2008: Submission of workshop papers
• December 15, 2008 Notification of authors about acceptance/rejection
• January 10, 2009 Submission of camera-ready papers