This research area relates to the understanding and development of the Knowledge Structure Mapping service for business. A paper that explains the ideas that the work is founded upon, Creating Knowledge Maps by Exploiting Dependent Relationships has been published in the journal 'Knowledge Based Systems' .
Using Knowledge Structure Maps as a Foundation for Knowledge Management
Creating Knowledge Structure Maps to support Explicit Knowledge Management
Knowledge Structure Mapping (KSM) involves making a knowledge area that may exist either solely or mostly in peoples heads, visible to the organisational management. In addition to this, the process includes qualification measures of the elements of knowledge within the knowledge structure that can be analysed in various ways to provide decision support. The process has been used many times in business, other organisations and even trade sectors. In each case, the managers responsible have been given the capability to make decisions regarding the support and development of the knowledge resource as well as taking information about the knowledge resource to inform other related business decisions. In general KSM offers an excellent decision support process that integrates the knowledge resource with other business decision making.
The
sort of questions typically associated with Knowledge Structure Mapping include:
The questions addressed by KSM are usually ones that are important business or organisational operations but they could also relate to more general knowledge areas or even more personal areas such as 'negotiation' or 'decision making'.
Outputs offer practical management decision support and include:
A page devoted to development news about the Knowledge Study Tool (KST) is available.