Knowledge Graph

The time writing my master thesis was absolutely great. It was extremely work intensive, but great! I got a lot of support from my family and girlfriend, and from my friends too. Thank you at this point. Now, I know what it means to work from 7.30 to 23.00 over several months every day including the weekend. I experienced that working over 100 hours a week isn’t really efficient. You work not at 100% and your personal efficiency rate decreases every additional day. It’s not recommendable to work many over a long period of time. It does not only affect your work, if you know what I mean.

Anyhow, my thesis’s topic seems to be very attractive. During my research I got lots of requests from all over the world. A Professor from the St. Louis University in America was interested in using my tool for further research on Natural Language Processing (NLP). Other knowledge workers wanted to share experience. The results of my research and the potential of an interactive knowledge map for knowledge transfer leads me to possible future works. I just got some recommendations searching for venture capitalist to innovate my invention. We’ll see. It’s not the only project on my fingertips.

Abstract

The success of knowledge transfer is crucial in the area of knowledge management. Not only companies in outsourcing-relations have the need of successful knowledge transfer. Organisations have the need of successful knowledge transfer too in order to create market advantages. This thesis introduces a graph-based knowledge browser for a CMS to support the topic of knowledge transfer by providing ?shared material? for generating knowledge and providing easy access to knowledge by visualising knowledge as associative networks. Knowledge is presented as graph or radial layout in hyperspace. Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX and SVG are used for the implementation.

Knowledge graph

I’m proceeding to the next round in the Imagine Cup 2007 as 3 ranked team. Only 30 Teams with 1-2 persons had the chance to proceed to the next round. This 30 teams were elected by community voting. Only registered competitors were allowed to vote for other teams. No one could vote for his own team. The Imagine Cup consists of 7 categories and over 100′000 students from all around the world joined to compete.

Imagine the Wiki concept combined with Web 2.0 and let it become 2D. The knowledge of a Wiki or every other CMS is visualised as a topic map with nodes (e.g. article, person, knowledge entity, activity) and relations between them if they have a relation. You don’t see one article at once, you see the hole context of an article! You can directly add new articles in the topic map or knowledge browser and can directly paint relations between nodes. The topic map is rendered in hyperspace to focus on the nodes in the center of the screen. But you can use your mouse to move the hyperspace and the hole topic map (i.e. graph). The layout is calcualted in realtime with either a Spring model or a radial layout. In the spring model repulsive and attractive forces between nodes are calcualted to get a layout with minimum edge crossings etc. (graph layout heuristics). It looks really nice ; It runs on a Web browser and with Web 2.0 technologies (Ajax).

My mentor Benjamin promoted my currently successful participation in the Imagine Cup 2007 at the Department of Informatics at the University of Zurich. He published a news article about my current ranking (3rd rank) and proceeding to the semi finals:

Leaderboard of the Imagine Cup 2007. My team is called IfIface

IfI Student Enters Semi Finals in International User Interface Competition

IfI diploma student Amancio Bouza ranked 3rd in the user interface discipline to enter the semi-finals of Microsoft’s international computer science talent competition Imagine Cup. His successful contribution presents a novel AJAX powered user interface. The solution improves accessing and modifying graph based knowledge structures in an enterprise content management system. The user interface unites editing and browsing functions, and therefore will empower regular knowledge workers to view and change how knowledge is represented within their organization more easily.

The diploma thesis is currently under development with the Information Management Research Group at the IfI. Since Mr. Bouza seems to be the only Swiss participant in the competition, he hopefully will advance to the final round held this summer in Korea.

Published: 04.04.07

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