ScienceDaily (Sep. 18, 2009) — An innovative new knowledge management concept has the potential to revolutionise the way government administrators work.
The SAKE research project was established to find a solution to the information overload facing many public administrators, particularly in newer Member States, where local and national governments are rapidly updating legislation and processes in line with their changing economies and European Union expectations.
The huge volume of information and changes – major and minor – make it difficult for administrators to maintain their productivity and to ensure they have taken all current factors into account when making decisions.
SAKE set out to create a knowledge management system that would proactively update public administrators on developments concerning their jobs, and explain any changes to data and documents with contextual background.
“We follow an ontology-based approach for modelling information resources, context and preferences, implemented on an event-driven architecture,” says Dr Nenad Stojanovic from FZI, and scientific coordinator of the SAKE research team.
“The architecture supports the processing of events that relate to changes in information resources and the working context of the user, increasing the system’s responsiveness. Action is taken on ‘relevant’ events – relevance is decided via ontology-based preference rules.”
The SAKE Knowledge Management System includes conventional tools, such as a content management system for the creation, sharing and editing of documents, and a groupware system with discussion forums, messaging tools, shared calendars, and a workflow system. Adding to these, the SAKE team has developed a novel Attention Management System (AMS) that semantically filters and retrieves data especially matching the user’s needs – an automatic ‘knowledge filter’ of sorts.