paolo ciccarese

An annotation is a note that is made while reading any form of text. This may be as simple as underlining or highlighting passages (from Wikipedia). In the digital world we can think of annotating any kind of resource and resource fragment (a video, a fragment of a video, a database record a section of an image). Annotation can be generated in many different ways - manual, semi-automatic and automatic - and used for many different purposes including - but not limited to - knowledge elicitation and crosslinking of resources. Read More

It is common to think at the current post-industrial global economy as an information-intensive environment. More remarkable is the high number of assertions that knowledge is the key of effective competition, marketplace distinction and profitability. Knowledge can be defined as the "awareness and understanding of facts, truths or information gained in the form of experience or learning. Knowledge is an appreciation of the possession of interconnected details which, in isolation, are of lesser value". Knowledge is considered an enterprise asset that, unlike material assets, which decrease as they are used, increase with use: ideas breed new ideas, and shared knowledge stays with the giver while it enriches the receiver. Knowledge has been broadly recognized as the key to effective competition. Read More.

Knowledge has been recognized as the key to success for Health Care Organizations (HCOs). Knowledge includes both the experience and the understanding of the people in the HCO, and the information artefacts, such as documents, guidelines, protocols, reports and emails archives, available within the organization. In particular, the increasing pressure on HCOs to ensure efficiency and cost-effectiveness, balancing quality of care and cost containment, drives them towards a more effective management of medical knowledge derived from research findings. Fostering HCOs knowledge management in general, and evidence-based best practice in particular, requires effective exploitation of new information and communication technology. Read More.

For scientific knowledge management systems, the context of information is its warrant for belief, while experiment in relation to theory and hypothesis supplies the criterion of truth. Discourse and social practice (of which it is a part) weave this whole together. What we must know about scientific assertions is, (a) what warrant (context) is provided by the author through discourse; (b) whether the warrant is valid in the light of other work and its abstraction in theory (also explored through discourse); and (c) how can we validate (replicate) this context for ourselves through experiment, in a continuous evolutionary process. Current practices in providing warrant are poorly adapted to the reality evolved over the past decade – that most scientific discourse now takes place mediated by digital artifacts accessed on the Web (read more). Read More.

Knowledge is social as produced and shared among a network of human and non-human actors within the organization. The mere existence of knowledge somewhere in the organization is of little benefit; it becomes useful only if it is accessible/sharable, and its value increases with the level of accessibility. This leads to the importance of communication/interaction (between humans and between humans and non-humans) as key factor for the success for a knowledge-intensive environment. Read More.