April 05, 2004
Knowledge-Management Systems
The current Nature offers a solution for scientists who need to share information - knowledge management software. In large organizations and companies, it is difficult to track who knows what and who is working on what project. The author describes that "it's a common frustration in scientific life: you have a seemingly simple query, but you aren't sure who can answer it. A basic experimental procedure, for example, might already have been mastered by someone else in the same building or company. Talking to that person could save you weeks of work - but how do you find them?
Knowledge-management systems build up a picture of who knows what in an organization, and uses the information to connect queries with answers. These systems have had some success in the pharmaceutical industry. And with electronic networking now embedded in scientific life, the infrastructure is there to implement knowledge management in new ways. Knowledge management can be considered as an organizational memory bank. Every problem that a staff member solves, from testing a candidate drug molecule to curing a glitch in computer code, adds to this memory. And if this treasure trove is accessible to others, the problem need only be solved once.
Electronic Memories
Trying to maintain a record of everything is certainly impractical, and anything useful can be lost in a sea of trivia. According to the article, the real communication takes place in peer-to-peer communication, not by managerial fiat. New knowledge-management software has also emerged in recent years. Employees of the pharmaceutical company Aventis are using one new system, called KnowledgeMail.
One researcher at Aventis looking for a specific procedure used KnowledgeMail to search the company's 5,000 research staff and 75,000 employees, believeing that there was a good chance that someone in Aventis had already solved these problems. KnowledgeMail quickly found two researchers in the company's US division at Bridgewater, Massachusetts, who could supply the information.
Mail Mining
The software, produced by Tacit of Palo Alto, California, develops an expertise profile of users based on words and phrases extracted from their e-mails. Thus, if one researcher gets a lot of e-mails about macrophages, the system assumes that they are an expert on the topic and sends appropriate questions their way. This allows expert profiles to be generated with little effort by users. Tacit's software has also been used by drug company AstraZeneca and technology firm Lockheed Martin; and KnowledgeMail has now evolved into a product called ActiveNet. It is estimated that KnowledgeMail saved the company 7.8 person months by minimizing duplicative efforts. The software builds up expertise profiles using e-mail scans, information on web pages visited and documents viewed.
Hewlett Packard and many other are invesing in this techology also known as a "System for Social Harvesting of Community Knowledge (SHOCK)" Recently, Google has announced "gmail" a free email service which will use similar technology by combining email and search capabilities to target advertisements based on email content. There has been some controversy over privacy concerns since its announcement but Google says the content of users' email would remain private because the process would be fully automated. "No humans read your emails to target the ads," Google's web site says.
Nature 428, 462 - 463 (01 April 2004)
Posted by rsk at April 5, 2004 10:54 PM