| Project objectives | Project results | Innovative approach | The architecture |
The LORE project's goal is to deliver an Integrated Knowledge Management Technology and Human Resource Management System for exploiting Human and Knowledge Capital Value.
The system allows the user to integrate people's competencies, processes and projects, document information and unstructured information for providing a common Knowledge Portal in order to enhance the team work inside of the enterprise. Further, it will facilitate the automated corporate knowledge sharing through a dynamic taxonomy and a linguistic analysis both of the documents and of people's competencies.".
Communication among people
To ease and to promote the communication between People providing the automatic generation of Networked Community in accordance with their role and their interests to enhance global knowledge sharing. We will integrate the HRMS with the description and maintenance of the internal Electronic Communication Network and the of the Document Management Systems at a Backoffice level.
The Job description of the individual implies his communication needs. A single update procedure and responsibility will enhance both communication within groups and quality or information about People competence within HRMS. The integration within the same system of the Document Warehouse grants common security to access any information in the system driven by the HR view. The goal is to have a complete and controlled flow of information across the people in the company administered simply and effectively. We believe that an effective information flow is a proactive step in growing the knowledge and competence of people.
Information retrieval
To simplify the information retrieval process and to extend width and depth of information retrieved by building, maintaining and accessing a single multiple taxonomy Knowledge Map which grants homogeneous access to people, processes, projects and knowledge objects.
The integrated view of processes, projects and people makes it possible to construct a complete Knowledge Map. Strong Document and Data management underlying technology allows easy exchange of information within the company
Automatic feedback
To set up automatic feedback from information flow to People competence data base. A well defined infrastructure of documents models and dictionaries for communities and projects within and outside the company will enhance the quality of communication minimise misunderstanding and help the enhancing the quality of documents.
The use of an appropriate dictionary of community keywords and of structured documents will otherwise ease the classification and "understanding" of the content of the documents. The integrated description of the environment reached via step 1 provides a connection between people and competence maps and projects, and between communities and their documents on the other site: based on the document traffic analysis and that of the semantic content of the documents the Knowledge map and the individual competencies map might be updated automatically or, at the very least, update suggestions may be supplied to evaluators. The understanding of what people in the company know, the "human capital" may be optimised in this way and used to its full potential.
In order to achieve these goals the LORE project is analysing and designing three main features which correspond to three architectural layers:
The Knowledge Base is the layer deputed to define, collect, share and re-use critical information. The objective is to include within the base applications that are able to manage their information domain (process, People, documents, data) and to record the relationship between them.
The Knowledge Map wants to inherit the proper information structure (hierarchy of process, competencies, etc.) proper of each application included in the Knowledge Base and to create a network of links between the hierarchies, a company taxonomy and all the knowledge objects available in the Base.
The Knowledge Portal has to allow the user to navigate among Knowledge Objects following the path of is choice and to extend the search services to any content included in the Knowledge Base.
The missing component in any architectural design of Knowledge Management System are People. Because of their past ( the products from which they come ), their not updated objectives and their Internet models radical adoption, all the proposed solutions are forced to ignore the Human Resources model who constitute the key source of any Knowledge create inside the Enterprise.
Our innovation aims span over four main topics :
1. Human Resources Management System Integration
Our objective is to have the HR and their operational structures, processes and projects, as the cornerstone of the whole KM architecture and to build a system able to keep track of expertise and competence created in day by day operational work . In other words we want to go beyond the messages and documents management boundaries. To do that, we need to integrate a Human Resources Management System and a Process/Project Management System with a Knowledge Management "traditional" application. We want the Knowledge Base to include organisational structure ( functional and by processes ) in order to answer the critical questions any information need arises: "Who knows what I'm looking for" and "Where and when ( projects ) a similar experience has been carried out in the past and who participated ". We want to allow the services offered by "traditional" system as indexing, searching and classifying to address a complete Knowledge base which include a complete coverage of organisational information based on the competency map.
2. Multiple Dimension Knowledge Map
Usually the classification method rely on a hand written taxonomy, which offer a hierarchy of topics of interest. This is a limiting and one way approach of "reading" the enterprise. We want to use the integration of HRMS and Process and Project Management System to create two additional navigation paths crossed with the taxonomy and inherited by the root applications. The process/projects and the competency hierarchies do offer different entry point to the Knowledge Map and useful research path while granting to reach the same Knowledge Objects at the end of the navigation (documents, data, report, projects, messages, People ). A multiple-dimension Knowledge Map allow user to navigate Knowledge choosing each time the more appropriate path, maintaining cross referential link to switch whenever the he wants to a different view (Taxonomy, Competency, Processes/Projects ).
3. Dynamic Model Updating and Active Behaviour
The day by day use of HRMS and Project Management by HR department effortlessly keep updated the Knowledge Map which is fed directly by the roots applications. Every change introduced in the Business Model or every new competency need, open a new trail within the Map. The Knowledge organisation stops being a critical and duplicated task to become a part of on-going Enterprise management. Each resource added to the organisation inherit through his allocation to projects and process his Knowledge environment and he's automatically enrolled to the communication group of his interest. Even the competencies related to employees are updated analyzing their working habits and contents to reduce the manual intervention and to limit the system maintenance and therefore the Knowledge Management System failure risk ( many km-projects fail because of the difficulty in keeping the taxonomy updated ).
4. Unique Portal based Access
We want to offer a single Portal as the unique user Knowledge Desktop to join an Enterprise Knowledge search based approach ( pull ) with an automatic ad hoc Knowledge delivery ( push ) . HRMS and Process/project manager application know the user history and they are able to address relevant contents on the user desktop through Intranet channel. Interpreting the user position inside the Knowledge Map the system can show the relevant information linked to his node. Alternatively the user can choose to access directly the Enterprise Knowledge Map and either use the search services to find text, competency, People, documents, projects ,etc. , or navigate freely the Knowledge Map following the favourite path.
LORE architecture is based on layers, each of one communicates with others. Mainly, communications are made between Portal-layer and Automatic Feedback-layer: the former (a frontend for underlying layers) call services exposed by the latter that embeds the semantic engine.
Those services are exposed through a new technology: Web-services. A Web Service is programmable application logic accessible using standard Internet protocols. Web Services combine the best aspects of component-based development and the World Wide Web.
Like components, Web Services represent black-box functionality that can be reused without worrying about how the service is implemented. Web Services provide well-defined interfaces, or contracts, that describe the services provided.
Web Services are accessed using ubiquitous Web protocols and data formats such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Extensible Markup Language (XML).
A Web Service contract describes the services provided solely in terms of the messages that the Web Service accepts and generates. No information about how the Web Service is implemented is necessary in the contract. Consumers of a Web Service do not need to know anything about the platform, object model, or programming language used to implement the service. They only need to understand how to send and receive messages as specified by the Web Services contract.
There are a few key specifications and technologies you are likely to encounter when building or consuming Web Services. These specifications and technologies address five requirements for service-based development:
XML is the obvious choice for a standard way to represent data. Most Web Service-related specifications use XML for data representation, as well as XML schemas to describe data types.
The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) defines a lightweight protocol for information exchange. Part of the SOAP specification defines a set of rules for how to use XML to represent data. Other parts of the SOAP specification define an extensible message format, conventions for representing remote procedure calls (RPCs) using the SOAP message format, and bindings to HTTP. (SOAP messages can be exchanged over other protocols, but the current specification defines bindings for HTTP only).
LORE architecture schema
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