Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Using Virtual Agents and Blogs for Knowledge Management

I just concluded my reading of Zhang's (2005) article discussing Web-based Knowledge management systems. In the last statement in the section of future trends and conclusions, Zhang suggests that automatic and intelligent knowledge extraction and retrieval (knowledge agents) should also be studied for Web-based knowledge management. This got me to think about how virtual agents can serve as knowledge agents that potentially automatically extract and create knowledge. In this brief post, I will summarise or briefly post on the idea of how virtual conversational agents or chatbots can serve as a codification strategy for Knowledge management.

In Zhang's (2005) article, a study is mentioned that discusses the codification strategy of knowledge management, where knowledge is extracted from human beings through an interview guide, that allows them to talk about their tacit knolwegde in a  way that it can be stored in databases and retrieved for use by anyone in the company. My idea essentially builds on this principle, which I will outline below:

  1. The virtual agent is configured or programmed like the famous ELIZA program to be an interviewer, to ask questions to elicit stories and extract from persons what they know by asking clarifications and prompting long responses or statements.
  2. Responses or the ensuing dialogue can then be saved so that the transcript can later be posted on a blog for persons to retrieve when needed. The blog will then be manually tagged for the content it contains and given titles and other attributes to indicate the content of the knowledge. Blogs also will enable full search capabilities for locating content matching user keywords.
These ideas I will further develop (after my comprehensive reading examination) and possible submit to a technology-based journal. But for now, just dropping these few ideas in the embryonic stage. As usual, comments are welcomed.


References:

Zhang, R. (2005). Knolwedge management on the Web. In M. Khosrow-Pour (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Information Science and technology (pp. 1770-1777). Hershey, PA: Idea Group. doi:10.4018/978-1-59140-553-5.ch311.

No comments:

Post a Comment