Goals and Objectives
The goal of the course is to understand important problems, challenges,
concepts and techniques dealing with the organization and management
of knowledge with the help of computers.
Upon satisfactory completion of this course, the student will:
- Understand the fundamental concepts in the study of knowledge
and its creation, acquisition, use and management.
- Appreciate the role and use of knowledge in organizations and institutions.
- Be familiar with the basic concepts, methods, techniques, and tools
for the support of knowledge management through computer-based systems.
- Understand the components and functions of knowledge management systems.
- Be prepared for further study in knowledge generation and transfer,
and in the architecture and representation of knowledge.
- Critically evaluate current trends in knowledge management
and their manifestation in business and industry.
In order to achieve these goals, students learn how to analyse, design, implement
and evaluate programs and systems of varying complexities.
The core aspect of these systems is to offer support to "knowledge workers",
in particular with respect to the ever-increasing amound of knowledge
and information that becomes available and necessary for many tasks.
This includes support for traditional tasks related to knowledge
management, such as the grouping of related documents into
categories or hierarchies, the generation of dictionaries
and ontologies, or the construction of knowledge networks
through references and citations.
In addition, methods and techniques that rely heavily on
features offered by computer-based systems can be used to
augment the human-centered tasks. Examples for such approaches
are collaborative filtering, automatic content- and usage-based
categorization of documents, the categorization of non-textual
information such as images, drawings or sound, or the extraction of relevant
keywords from documents.
In contrast to knowledge-based systems, where
computers are actively involved in the manipulation and
generation of knowledge, the goal here is to use computers
as tools for activities mainly performed or at least directed
by humans.