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This paper sets forth a method to develop an architectural approach to the design, development, creation, and implementation of knowledge management at a specific organization.
As other fields of industry, space activities are facing the challenge of Knowledge Management and the International Academy of Astronautics decided to settle in 2002 a Study Group to analyse the problem and issue general guidelines. This communication presents the draft position paper of this group in view to be discussed during the 2003 IAF Congress.
Users continuously evaluate the value and performance of their Knowledge Management Systems (KMS). As suggested by a punctuated socio-technical system process model, today's success can quickly become tomorrow's failure should the KMS fail to meet evolving needs and expectations. The more deeply a tool is embedded in the actual work process, the more vulnerable it is to emergent changes and perturbations. This paper uses the metaphor of a "3-stringed violin" to explore how differing levels of user knowledge about tools and processes can lead to system perturbations and how the active involvement of other actors can dampen the impact of perturbations, i.e., help the system survive the operational equivalent of a broken string. Recommendations suggest ways to increase system resiliency and contribute to incremental innovation.
By facilitating the capture, organization, and dissemination of knowledge within and beyond the institution, knowledge management (KM) in higher education institutions (HEIs) fuels innovation, enhances research impact, and strengthens collaboration, ultimately leading to the creation of new knowledge and its valuable exchange. However, there is still much to explore in terms of the enablers of knowledge creation, sharing, and transfer. Therefore, this paper aims to identify the enablers of effective KM in the Polytechnique University of Leiria, which serves as a benchmark for other higher education institutions due to its leadership role in RUN-EU, a consortium of European universities. To achieve this, a narrative analysis based on information from SCOPUS and the institute’s website, focusing on innovation, research, and development strategies, is proposed. The findings suggest that for KM initiatives to be successful, they need to be strategically designed, culturally supported, technologically enabled, and integrated into existing workflows.
This Content Migration Plan provides a framework and methodology for managing and executing the migration of content to the NEFC Program’s on-premises SharePoint 2016 instance, as well as guidelines regarding how to ensure that Knowledge Management Program content, both during and after the migration, is tagged properly. Analysis continues to develop a migration plan for a SharePoint Online instance in a Cloud environment.
The EVA Wiki was recently implemented as the primary knowledge database to retain critical knowledge and skills in the EVA Operations group at NASA's Johnson Space Center by ensuring that information is recorded in a common, easy to search repository. Prior to the EVA Wiki, information required for EVA flight controllers and instructors was scattered across different sources, including multiple file share directories, SharePoint, individual computers, and paper archives. Many documents were outdated, and data was often difficult to find and distribute. In 2011, a team recognized that these knowledge management problems could be solved by creating an EVA Wiki using MediaWiki, a free and open-source software developed by the Wikimedia Foundation. The EVA Wiki developed into an EVA-specific Wikipedia on an internal NASA server. While the technical implementation of the wiki had many challenges, one of the biggest hurdles came from a cultural shift. Like many enterprise organizations, the EVA Operations group was accustomed to hierarchical data structures and individually-owned documents. Instead of sorting files into various folders, the wiki searches content. Rather than having a single document owner, the wiki harmonized the efforts of many contributors and established an automated revision controlled system. As the group adapted to the wiki, the usefulness of this single portal for information became apparent. It transformed into a useful data mining tool for EVA flight controllers and instructors, as well as hundreds of others that support the EVA. Program managers, engineers, astronauts, flight directors, and flight controllers in differing disciplines now have an easier-to-use, searchable system to find EVA data. This paper presents the benefits the EVA Wiki has brought to NASA's EVA community, as well as the cultural challenges it had to overcome.
The EVA Wiki was recently implemented as the primary knowledge database to retain critical knowledge and skills in the EVA Operations group at NASA's Johnson Space Center by ensuring that information is recorded in a common, easy to search repository. Prior to the EVA Wiki, information required for EVA flight controllers and instructors was scattered across different sources, including multiple file share directories, SharePoint, individual computers, and paper archives. Many documents were outdated, and data was often difficult to find and distribute. In 2011, a team recognized that these knowledge management problems could be solved by creating an EVA Wiki using MediaWiki, a free and open-source software developed by the Wikimedia Foundation. The EVA Wiki developed into an EVA-specific Wikipedia on an internal NASA server. While the technical implementation of the wiki had many challenges, one of the biggest hurdles came from a cultural shift. Like many enterprise organizations, the EVA Operations group was accustomed to hierarchical data structures and individually-owned documents. Instead of sorting files into various folders, the wiki searches content. Rather than having a single document owner, the wiki harmonized the efforts of many contributors and established an automated revision controlled system. As the group adapted to the wiki, the usefulness of this single portal for information became apparent. It transformed into a useful data mining tool for EVA flight controllers and instructors, as well as hundreds of others that support EVA. Program managers, engineers, astronauts, flight directors, and flight controllers in differing disciplines now have an easier-to-use, searchable system to find EVA data. This paper presents the benefits the EVA Wiki has brought to NASA's EVA community, as well as the cultural challenges it had to overcome.
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center's Propulsion Systems Department (PSD) is four months into a fifteen month Knowledge Management (KM) initiative to support enhanced engineering decision making and analyses, faster resolution of anomalies (near-term) and effective, efficient knowledge infused engineering processes, reduced knowledge attrition, and reduced anomaly occurrences (long-term). The near-term objective of this initiative is developing a KM Pilot project, within the context of a 3-5 year KM strategy, to introduce and evaluate the use of KM within PSD. An internal NASA/MSFC PSD KM team was established early in project formulation to maintain a practitioner, user-centric focus throughout the conceptual development, planning and deployment of KM technologies and capabilities within the PSD. The PSD internal team is supported by the University of Alabama's Aging Infrastructure Systems Center of Excellence (AISCE), lntergraph Corporation, and The Knowledge Institute. The principle product of the initial four month effort has been strategic planning of PSD KNI implementation by first determining the "as is" state of KM capabilities and developing, planning and documenting the roadmap to achieve the desired "to be" state. Activities undertaken to suppo~th e planning phase have included data gathering; cultural surveys, group work-sessions, interviews, documentation review, and independent research. Assessments and analyses have beon pedormed including industry benchmarking, related local and Agency initiatives, specific tools and techniques used and strategies for leveraging existing resources, people and technology to achieve common KM goals. Key findings captured in the PSD KM Strategic Plan include the system vision, purpose, stakeholders, prioritized strategic objectives mapped to the top ten practitioner needs and analysis of current resource usage. Opportunities identified from research, analyses, cultural1KM surveys and practitioner interviews include: executive and senior management sponsorship, KM awareness, promotion and training, cultural change management, process improvement, leveraging existing resources and new innovative technologies to align with other NASA KM initiatives (convergence: the big picture). To enable results based incremental implementation and future growth of the KM initiative, key performance measures have been identified including stakeholder value, system utility, learning and growth (knowledge capture, sharing, reduced anomaly recurrence), cultural change, process improvement and return-on-investment. The next steps for the initial implementation spiral (focused on SSME Turbomachinery) have been identified, largely based on the organization and compilation of summary level engineering process models, data capture matrices, functional models and conceptual-level svstems architecture. Key elements include detailed KM requirements definition, KM technology architecture assessment, - evaluation and selection, deployable KM Pilot design, development, implementation and evaluation, and justifying full implementation (estimated Return-on-Investment). Features identified for the notional system architecture include the knowledge presentation layer (and its components), knowledge network layer (and its components), knowledge storage layer (and its components), User Interface and capabilities. This paper provides a snapshot of the progress to date, the near term planning for deploying the KM pilot project and a forward look at results based growth of KM capabilities with-in the MSFC PSD.
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Safety, failure, and incident reports are common artifacts across various domains, including aviation and wildfire response. These reports are often mandatory to submit, resulting in the culmination of large repositories of text-based documents. Simultaneously, these reports and corresponding repositories are often only manually analyzed and queried by users via out-of-date search engines. As a consequence, we have been developing the Manager for Intelligent Knowledge Access (MIKA) toolkit, which uses natural language processing to improve information access and reuse. In this presentation, we discuss natural language processing techniques for knowledge discovery and apply these methods to a repository of aerial wildfire mishap reports. Two methods are used for knowledge discovery: topic modeling and named-entity recognition. We use topic modeling to identify hazards and perform a trend analysis to produce a data-driven risk matrix. A custom named-entity recognition model, build from fine tuning a pre-trained language model, is used to identify failure modes, failure causes, failure effects, control processes, and recommendations to aid in failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA). Throughout the presentation, we discuss and apply natural language processing techniques to better leverage the vast amount of information contained in report repositories.
The EVA (Extravehicular Activity) Wiki was recently implemented as the primary knowledge database to retain critical knowledge and skills in the EVA Operations group at NASA's Johnson Space Center by ensuring that information is recorded in a common, searchable repository. Prior to the EVA Wiki, information required for EVA flight controllers and instructors was scattered across different sources, including multiple file share directories, SharePoint, individual computers, and paper archives. Many documents were outdated, and data was often difficult to find and distribute. In 2011, a team recognized that these knowledge management problems could be solved by creating an EVA Wiki using MediaWiki, a free and open-source software developed by the Wikimedia Foundation. The EVA Wiki developed into an EVA-specific Wikipedia on an internal NASA server. While the technical implementation of the wiki had many challenges, the one of the biggest hurdles came from a cultural shift. Like many enterprise organizations, the EVA Operations group was accustomed to hierarchical data structures and individually-owned documents. Instead of sorting files into various folders, the wiki searches content. Rather than having a single document owner, the wiki harmonized the efforts of many contributors and established an automated revision control system. As the group adapted to the wiki, the usefulness of this single portal for information became apparent. It transformed into a useful data mining tool for EVA flight controllers and instructors, and also for hundreds of other NASA and contract employees. Program managers, engineers, astronauts, flight directors, and flight controllers in differing disciplines now have an easier-to-use, searchable system to find EVA data. This paper presents the benefits the EVA Wiki has brought to NASA's EVA community, as well as the cultural challenges it had to overcome.
Edward Fredkin was an enthusiastic advocate of information-based theoretical physics, who, in the early 1980s, proposed a new theory of physics based on the idea that the universe is ultimately composed of software. According to Fredkin, reality should be considered as being composed not of particles, matter and forces or energy but of bits of data or information modified according to computational rules. Fredkin went on to demonstrate that, while energy is necessary for storing and retrieving information, it can be arbitrarily reduced in order to carry out any particular instance of information processing, and this operation does not have a lower bound. This implies that it is information rather than matter or energy that should be considered at the ultimate fundamental constituent of reality. This possibility had already been suggested by other scientists. Norbert Wiener heralded a fundamental shift from energy to information and suggested that the universe was founded essentially on the transformation of information, not energy. However, Konrad Zuse was the first, back in 1967, to defend the idea that a digital computer is computing the universe. Richard P. Feynman showed this possibility in a similar light in his reflections on how information related to matter and energy. Other pioneering research on the theory of digital physics was published by Kantor in 1977 and more recently by Stephen Wolfram in 2002, who thereby joined the host of voices upholding that it is patterns of information, not matter and energy, that constitute the cornerstones of reality. In this paper, we introduce the use of knowledge management tools for the purpose of analysing this topic.
In scientific simulation, scientists use measured data to create numerical models, execute simulations and analyze results from advanced simulators executing on high performance computing platforms. This process usually requires a team of scientists collaborating on data collection, model creation and analysis, and on authorship of publications and data. This paper shows that scientific teams can benefit from a user environment called Akuna that permits subsurface scientists in disparate locations to collaborate on numerical modeling and analysis projects. The Akuna user environment is built on the Velo framework that provides both a rich client environment for conducting and analyzing simulations and a Web environment for data sharing and annotation. Akuna is an extensible toolset that integrates with Velo, and is designed to support any type of simulator. This is achieved through data-driven user interface generation, use of a customizable knowledge management platform, and an extensible framework for simulation execution, monitoring and analysis. This paper describes how the customized Velo content management system and the Akuna toolset are used to integrate and enhance an effective collaborative research and application environment. The extensible architecture of Akuna is also described and demonstrates its usage for creation and execution of a 3D subsurface simulation.
This study was conducted to better understand how New Product Development (NPD) team members apply their experiences to meet the task needs of their project. Although "experience" is highly valued in team members, little research has looked specifically at experiences as a type of knowledge, and how this knowledge is used in work settings. This research evaluated nearly 200 instances where team members referenced past experiences during team meetings. During these experience exchanges, team members structured the sharing of their experiences to include three common elements: the source of the experience, the nature of the experience, and the degree of relevance to the current work of the team. The experiences fell into four categories: people (relationships), process, product, and politics. This paper describes how team members structured, applied, and integrated their individual experiences and presents the resulting implications for knowledge management systems that wish to exploit experience knowledge.
Although workers in the information age have more information at their fingertips than ever before, the ability to effectively capture and reuse actual knowledge is still a surmounting challenge for many organizations. As high tech organizations transform from providing complex products and services in an established domain to providing them in new domains, knowledge remains an increasingly valuable commodity. This paper explores the supply and demand elements of the "knowledge market" within the International Space Station and Spacecraft Processing Directorate (ISSSPD) of NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC). It examines how knowledge supply and knowledge demand determine the success of an organization's knowledge management (KM) activities, and how the elements of a KM infrastructure (tools, culture, and training), can be used to create and sustain knowledge supply and demand
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The use of Engineered Barrier Systems (EBS) for spent nuclear fuel disposal is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Energy as a part of the Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition (SFWD) Campaign. Such dry spent fuel canisters would be loaded with fuel bundles, and then transported and stored at a nuclear waste repository. Once the canisters are in place underground, the space between the canister and the wall rock will be filled with bentonite clay. Recent research has prioritized high temperature interactions of EBS materials, including phase transitions in bentonite clay, in order to reduce worker dose and repository cost. Higher temperature (i.e., 200ºC) thermal limits are a new area of investigation by the U.S. and international repository science programs. The hydrothermal experimental laboratory at Los Alamos, consisting of rocking autoclaves and cold seal assemblies, is critical to the campaign and presents a significant temperature / pressure safety hazard. Therefore, working competently and safely with these systems is very important to the knowledge management procedures developed at this laboratory. Therefore, the operation of these two systems (rocking autoclaves and cold seal assemblies) will be discussed first.