Knowledge Centers

Knowledge Centers (KC) are knowledge management systems designed by staff in the Knowledge and Learning Systems Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications located at the University of Illinois. Knowledge Centers are designed to facilitate the sharing of explicit and tacit knowledge and can be customized to fit the needs of a specific user or community of users. Each Knowledge Center is comprised of four components, all of which are integrated together into a single easy to use interface. The four components are:

Knowledge Base
Collaboration Space
Knowledge Exchange
e-Learning Space

By employing one or more of these components at any given time individuals can locate critical information, collaborate with their peers, or conduct sharing/outreach activities to other members of their immediate community and the communities surrounding them.

The Knowledge Base or dynamic knowledge repository serves as a source of knowledge originating from a variety of document types, such as web documents, user-submitted documents/files, emails, forum postings, URLs, and presentation materials and is supported by advanced search engine techniques developed at the University of Illinois (UIUC). The Knowledge Base is initially populated through a targeted web crawl and by subscribing it to listservs, newsgroups, and other online information systems.

The crawler also does intelligent updates by re-crawling sites that exhibit change from the crawler's previous visit. Furthermore, captured documents are processed and tagged at multiple levels so that searches can extract specific types of information from within a given document (i.e., names, citations, images, etc). For example, if the user wanted to locate bibliographic citations from documents within the Knowledge Base, the search routine would identify relevant documents based upon the user's search terms and then the Knowledge Base would extract and display any citations appearing within the relevant documents.

The Knowledge Center also contains a Collaboration Space for real-time and asynchronous collaborations allowing community members to interact with colleagues and counterparts at other institutions. The Collaboration Space has a fully searchable message board to support threaded asynchronous discussions as well as an auto-archiving chat system that can be used for real time communications. A third component is a cross-platform multipoint video conferencing system that can simultaneously link multiple users. These conferences also can be archived and shared with other community members as needed. Other tools within the Collaboration Space include a searchable community calendar for posting announcements and important dates, archived email lists, and member directory services for locating specific information about a KC user.

Another component of the Knowledge Center is a Knowledge Exchange that provides for the sharing of tacit knowledge among the community by allowing any user to pose questions to the community at large or to an identified expert. As expert-specific questions are received by the system, the KC automatically generates an email to the expert notifying him/her of the question. S/he can quickly click on a link, type in their answer, and submit it to the KC. The KC then generates an email to the user who posed the question informing him/her of the posted response. As with the tools in the Collaboration Space, all the interactions within the Knowledge Exchange are auto-archiving and immediately searchable.

The fourth part of the Knowledge Center is an e-Learning Space. The e-Learning space uses a built-in WYSIWYG text editor along with integrated file uploading capabilities to facilitate easy content creation with no HTML coding or additional FTP software. Once in the system, content is easily shared and re-used with just a few clicks. Trainers/educators can even organize and deliver their own workshops and conferences from within a Knowledge Center using its workshop administration features. Among its feature is the capability to support the submission, review, management, and scheduling of workshop/conference proposals.