Project KM

7/29/2019 Project KM

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To integrate the whole student

community of VU for Knowledge

Sharing

Submitted to: Instructor MGMT630

Submitted by: Muhammad Safdar Niazi

MC070200304

Fall 2008

Date submitted: 05-01-2009

Virtual University of Pakistan


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MGMT630 Knowledge Management

Acknowledgments

I express my deepest sense of gratitude to ALMIGHTY ALLAH,

Who bestowed upon me the potential and ability to make

thanks from the bottom of my heart to

The HOLY PROPHET (PBUH),

Who is forever a torch of guidance and knowledge for

humanity at all times.

I feel great pleasure to express cordial thanks to respected

Instructor STA-630, whose guidance encouraged me in writ ing this

project.

I am also thankful to my friends who provided me the help and

suggestions when and where needed.

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VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN

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Table of Contents

1. ABSTRACT .................................................................................................... 1

2. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................ 1

3. SPAN OF THE PROJECT ..............................................................................3

4. EDUCATION SYSTEM ...................................................................................4

4.1. E-Learning Approach ..................................................................................................................... ...4

4.2 Virtual Community for Students ................................................................................................... ....5

4.3 Importance of interaction between VU students ........................................................................... ...5

5. P2P-IR ARCHITECTURE ...............................................................................6

5.1 IMPLEMENTATION ......................................................................................7

5.2 INDEXING A NEW DOCUMENT ..................................................................7

5.3 DOCUMENT AND CONTENT MANAGEMENT .......................................... 8

5.4 Document Collection ........................................................................................................................ ...9

5.5 Document Management ......................................................................................................................9

5.6 Document Indexing ..................................................................................................................... ........9

5.7 Retrieval Models ................................................................................................................................. .9

5.8 Retrieval Process with Ranking ................................................................................................... ....10

6. CONCLUSION ..............................................................................................10

REFERENCES ..................................................................................................11

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1. Abstract

The digital revolution today has carried education into a completely new era where teaching and

learning not only take place at institutions but at homes and in the workplace. Electronic Learning

provides the ability to harvest the power of technology to make the learning experience more

effective and enjoyable. It is about effective integration of technology into the educational system

to enhance the learning process. Virtual communities are about more than just collaboration, but

collaboration provides the mechanisms through which knowledge is shared and much learning

takes place. Community knowledge includes its documents, discussions, decisions, conceptual

models, formal educational modules, workflows and processes, and awareness by members of

other members expertise. Community knowledge also includes the links (relationships)

among all these elements and documents, including relationships among members based

on their expertise profiles and similar retrieval and evaluation of other community

knowledge resources. This knowledge should develop into a community memory for

remembering past experiences, considerations and decisions which has proven

notoriously difficult to maintain over time. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems are very large

computer networks, where peers collaborate to provide a common service. Providing

large-scale Information Retrieval for searching the Word Wide Web is an appealing

application for P2P systems. The research community has presented several proposals for

P2P-IR. However, so far the concepts of P2P and of IR have been intermingled. In this

paper, I propose architecture to structure P2P-IR systems. It differentiates between

concepts belonging to the construction and maintenance of a P2P overlay network, and

those belonging to IR.

2. Introduction

One of the major arguments against online instruction centers on the misconception that

the online format of course delivery is cold and impersonal. Student interaction and

engagement are missing; hence, the quality of the learning experience is compromised.

Classroom interaction is not a result of the physical structure or instructional format of the

course. Interaction is the result of an involved, enthusiastic instructor, and a distance

learning program that provides and promotes student interaction outside the confines of

the online or distance course. Educational research has proven that the Web-based modeof instruction can be just as personal and engaging as its brick and mortar counterpart, if

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not more so, due to the anonymity factor the Web lends to the students. Students are more

apt to express themselves when freed from the pressures of face-to-face interaction within

the traditional classroom. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems are very large computer networks,

where peers collaborate to provide a common service. Providing large-scale Information

Retrieval (IR), e.g. for searching the Word Wide Web, is an appealing application for P2P

systems. The research community has presented several proposals for P2P-IR. However,

so far the concepts of P2P and of IR have been intermingled. The required architecture is

to structure a P2P-IR system. To differentiate between concepts belonging to the

construction and maintenance of a P2P overlay network, and those belonging to IR.

Furthermore to distinguish basic P2P-IR concepts, which are likely to be needed in all

P2P-IR systems, and advanced P2P-IR concepts, that rather depend on the favor of the

system? This decomposition of the P2P retrieval process is an important step towards a

structured implementation of such systems. Additionally, it allows a systematic sharing of

methods and resources needed to perform retrieval. The next generation of global

information retrieval systems will combine these distributed resources in new ways to

provide more efficient web search.

The World Wide Web opened up new possibilities for people to collaborate. Even so,

people and society are not benefiting nearly as much as they could from access to other

people and knowledge (Preece 2000). Properly supported virtual communities could bring

society to a new level of learning through collaboration and knowledge-sharing in ways

we are only beginning to conceive.

Virtuality has several definitions. For some it indicates distance, requiring collaborators

to communicate asynchronously (different time, different place). For some it indicatesthe ability of the computer to represent information in ways different from reality,

enabling many potential tools for expressing complex or conceptual information in

formats that would allow a broad range of different people to understand it and participate

in exploring it (Turoff 1997). For some it indicates an organizational (or community)

structure that is flexible enough to optimize individual and group performance under new

and changing conditions (Mowshowitz 1995; Robey et al. 1998). Participation within

virtual communities should share all these characteristics.

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Overall research objective is to understand how to support learning in virtual

communities. We will determine how to structure virtual communities so that people

participating can improve everyday tasks and activities individually for themselves, as

well as collectively within groups and for the community as a whole. We will examine

the notion of virtuality; the requirements for and benefits of knowledge support

(knowledge building, sharing, management and evolution); and critical mass and

sustainability. We will prototype tools to facilitate learning, collaboration and knowledge

management. We will develop new evaluation techniques for virtual community

research. We will provide test beds for ourselves and for other virtual community

research.

3. Span of the project

Web-based learning approach is proposed to improve the self-paced learning of

students. In general, K-Share tool is aimed to improve, effective learning process for

students. K-Share is an integrating knowledge management suit to produce innovative

and effective knowledge sharing environment for students. VU Students can get

necessary assistance from any experts to solve their queries or problems in the case of

virtual learning workplace. According to Kiili (2001), the traditional idea of young

student attending lectures and seminars on a daily basis is not the usual solution for

getting high education any more. This means offering wide-range knowledge sharing

platform reduce their anxiety and improves their confidence in learning things much

faster than traditional teaching environment.

The reason of the project is to suggest, design and develop a platform to integrate the

whole student community of VU for Knowledge Sharing. The community formed by the

students of VU student is a virtual community which lacks physical interaction. The

platform is suggested a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures which intended to allow

autonomous peers to interoperate in a decentralized, distributed manner for fulfilling

individual and/or common goals. Peers have equivalent capabilities in providing other

peers with data and/or services. Confederations of peers may be forged or broken

opportunistically through the choices made by individual peers. The overall performance

of a P2P network emerges from local point-to-point interactions of (all) peers on the

network. The P2P paradigm in general offers a prospect of robustness, scalability and

availability of large pool of storage and computational resources.

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4. Education System

Over the past decade there has been a growing concern about the role of higher

educational institutions and how they are meeting the needs of students. Increasingly,

higher education institutions are being asked by industry, government and higher

education funding bodies to produce graduates with versatile workplace skills, as well as

subject specific skills (Luca et al, 2001). In general, the education sector could be

described as one where there is slow creation and diffusion of knowledge. The general

question is when KM is a driving force for change else where, how is the education

system responding and how should it respond? (Walshe,J., 2002).Universities do frame

the syllabus and then the affiliated colleges prepare lecture materials for classroomteaching in respective places. The university will conduct the final exam. In this set up,

every college prepares their own lecture materials and delivers the same to students. The

preparation of lecture material and content may vary from place to place and teachers

teach the same syllabus differently. Because teaching is based on the skill of teacher,

background of student, method of teaching and teaching aids. Dr. Mahalingam College of

engineering and technology is established with Internet and intranet facilities for about

1000 computers for various branches of study in Engineering, Science and Technology.

Campus is wired with fiber optic cable with 4-Mbps Internet bandwidth connectivity with

redundant capacity. Faculties are trained to use of Internet tools and Interactive

multimedia tools for classroom experience since 2001. Video conferencing facility is

extended with international institutions for collaborative project work. Since the

management has implemented facilities in information and communication technology

(ICT), therefore students are doing better learning activities at this institution. The role of

the college is to ensure the same level of input to all students equally and also to provide

quality learning materials to the students. The lecture content is generally screened and

advised by the appointed Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) before delivering to students.

Presently, college K-Share system is made available through intranet for students to

access the learning content within our institution.

4.1. E-Learning Approach

Web-based learning approach is proposed to improve the self-paced learning of students.

In general, Knowledge Share tool is aimed to improve, effective learning process for

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students. Students are involved to give necessary and feedback about knowledge share

during their course of learning. Knowledge Share is developed to share learning support

materials for the courses of computer science and engineering & information technology.

Knowledge Sharing is an integrating knowledge management suit to produce innovative

and effective knowledge sharing environment for the students.

4.2 Virtual Community for Students

For many students, the lack of face-to-face classroom instruction can lead to a sense of

isolation, loneliness and frustration, particularly when adding the need for good computer

and internet skills with sound motivational and learning practices required for successful

online learning. Learning anxiety can be increased highly over that of the traditional

classroom; and, slightly half of the online students successfully complete their course.

This is an industry trend. However, when online students form relationships and

partnerships in the learning process, the anxiety level is decreased. In many online

courses, students must take the initiative and create their own support system by, for

example, e-mailing classmates for help. Its a hit or miss situation. The Virtual

community for student provides a central meeting place, outside of the online classroom,

where students can find help and support easily. The Virtual Student Community is a

focal point for student interaction and information exchange designed to decrease the

learning anxiety experienced by online students as a result of the emotional distance

factor induced by the physical distance between students and instructors in online

courses.

4.3 Importance of interaction between VU students

The rapid development of computer and Internet technologies has dramatically increased

the ways of teaching and learning. Among these new approaches, online Web-based

education has become a promising field. Many educators point out the importance of

interaction in high quality online education. For instance, Shale and Garrison (1990) state

that interaction is education at its most fundamental form. In addition, Palloff and Pratt

(1999) argue that the keys to the learning process are the interactions among students

themselves, the interactions between faculty and students, and the collaboration inlearning that results from these interactions. Constructivism posits that knowledge is

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generated or constructed by the learner through his or her interactions in the environment.

People build meaning and make sense of their world through interacting with their

surroundings. Social constructivists believe that learning occurs through social dialog and

shared experiences (Jonassen, Davidson, Collins, Campbell, & Haag, 1995). From this

perspective, interacting with others and with learning materials seems vital for learners to

construct the knowledge internally. In effect, the mind, according to social constructivists,

extends beyond the skin.

5. P2P-IR Architecture

In this section we introduce the proposed P2P-IR architecture. Figure 1 show the

architecture, which consists of four layers. Each layer can be conceived as a space of

objects with a specific topology (e.g. a similarity measure or distance function), and with

certain operations to access and manipulate these objects. Each layer primarily uses

operations of the layer underneath it to implement its operations. Objects at higher layers

are related to (one or more) objects at lower layers. The problem of P2P-IR consists

essentially in locating document objects (on layer 4) that are semantically close to a given

document (respectively query) at peers (on layer 1) that store these documents. On layer

4, the objects are documents. The ranking functions of specific IR models dense the

semantic distance between two documents. The algorithms of these ranking functions are

typically based on computations performed on keys (short for keyword sets), which are

extracted from the documents. Keys are the objects on layer 3 and serve as the building

blocks for semantic distance on layer 4. In a P2P system a large number of peers share

resources (and the execution of tasks on them). The key idea of structured P2P overlay

networks is to partition resources. We achieve such a partitioning by associating peers

and resources with indenters from the same (application-specific) space. The basicfunction of a structured overlay network is to efficiently route resource requests, which

any peer can submit, to responsible peers in the network. In the literature this service is

referred to as key-based routing (KBR) 1 [2]. By mapping keys of layer 3 to indenters of

layer 2, we associate certain document management tasks to specific peers. In this paper,

we concentrate on structured overlay networks for layer 2. An adaptation to unstructured

overlays is part of future work. The purpose of layer 2 is to provide a logical network,

which is independent of the inherent dynamics (e.g. because of network failures, dynamic

IP, or mobility of peers) of the physical network (layer 1). The reason for choosing

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different spaces for indenters on layer 2 and keys on layer 3 is that methods for managing

a structured overlay network impose certain properties on the indenter space that are not

necessarily satisfied by a key space, which has to full IR requirements. Nevertheless,

mappings with distance-preserving properties are an important tool for optimizations in

P2P-IR. Similarly, distance-preserving mappings from indenters on layer 2 to physical

addresses on layer 1 support optimizations of the physical access to peers.

Fig. 1. P2P-IR Architecture

5.1 Implementation

In this section we sketch how typical retrieval tasks, namely document indexing and

document retrieval, are implemented using our layered architecture.

5.2 Indexing a new Document

The following steps are taken upon insertion of a new document. Even if a peer holds

documents that are only accessible to authenticated users, it can still index these

documents to make them searchable.

1. A peerp on layer 4 decides to include a document into a search engine using a

specific retrieval model. It uses a function to generate the document digest, i.e. the

keys and associated statistics representing the document according to the retrieval

model. p also provides the cluster(s) in which the document should be included,

respectively decides to create a new cluster for the document. It generates a unique

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key for the document.

2. For implementing the layer-4 operations, p retrieves through layer 3 the cluster

hierarchy and vocabulary that the retrieval model is based on. These queries are

routed on layer 2 as payload to the corresponding peers and require the layer-3

support functions for converting document and cluster indenters into layer-2

indenters. The receiving peers interpret the payload using their local document

management functions and return the results (either directly or by routing).

3. The document is now included on layer 3 into the document collection and

associated with the corresponding cluster(s). Next the new or up-dated cluster

digest is inserted into the posting list.

4. For inserting a new cluster digest into a posting list, layer-2 routing is used and the

keys are converted into layer-2 indenters.

5. The insertion of new documents also triggers updates on the statistics of the

vocabulary. Depending on the usage patterns, vocabularies are possibly widely

replicated. Therefore broadcast functions may be used to perform these updates

efficiently.

5.3 Document and Content Management

Independent of which semantic models are used for retrieval, certain tasks of document

management are common to all models and will serve as building blocks for the

dentition of retrieval models. Such common tasks are, for example, maintaining a

distributed document repository, associating term sets with documents, maintaining

vocabularies, and cluster hierarchies. We therefore separately identify these tasks

through a set of generic primitives that view documents as structured data objects. The

specific choice of these primitives has been driven by an analysis of the needs of

common retrieval models and by the principle of providing a simple, yet sufficiently

powerful model to satisfy the needs of a wide range of models. In particular, we identify

share-able resources and address issues of distribution. The distributed, and thus

scalable, implementation of such functions relies on the primitives provided through

structured overlay networks on layer 2. From these primitives we derive interfaces,

which layer 3 provides to upper layers.

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5.4 Document Collection

The P2P network provides the capability to store and retrieve documents based on

unique indenters associated with documents. A document is a string, which is not

further interpreted, and represents the smallest addressing granularity.

5.5 Document Management

Document management allows adding and deleting documents from the document

collection. A document is always accessible by its unique indenter.

5.6 Document Indexing

An application can join documents from the collection into any cluster using a method

associate. This association method indexes the document in the cluster, i.e. it generates

a document representation, which consists of a document digest and keys for indexing.

The document is indexed for all vocabularies that are associated with the cluster

hierarchy of the cluster. In addition, the corresponding vocabularies have to update the

statistical information they maintain. Note that a vocabulary is potentially replicated

over many peers. Such an indexing operation may therefore affect a number of different

peers. Efficient maintenance strategies for vocabularies will thus be a key element of

successful implementations of P2P-IR systems.

5.7 Retrieval Models

Different retrieval models use the same document and content management functions of

layer 3. Thus, it is important to have a common framework, in which we can capture the

model we would like to use. Such a framework characterizes notions like ranking,

relevance, rank aggregation, etc. and should be probabilistic (in some sense).

Basic concepts on layer 4 are the representation of user queries, the provision of ranking

and clustering functions, and interfaces for basic information retrieval tasks. Layer 4

provides functions for constructing vocabularies and document indexing, such as

extracting keys from documents. The implementation of these functions relies on the

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services provided by layer 3. Due to space limitations we omit a detailed specification

of this layer.

5.8 Retrieval Process w i t h Ranking

The following steps are performed when retrieving a document:

1. On layer 4 a peerp receives a query for the retrieval of documents ac-cording to a

specific retrieval model.

2. The peerp needs access to the relevant vocabulary to obtain global information on

distributional properties of keys. Therefore p performs a search for a peer that

stores such a vocabulary.

3. p generates a set of query keys from the application query.

4. The set of query keys is used to retrieve the posting lists using the layer-3 function

re t r i eve ( ) , which in turn is executed by using layer-2 routing functionality.

5. After having retrieved the posting lists, which are possibly pre-ltered,p (on layer 4)

computes the ranked result according to the specific retrieval model.

6. For producing a more compact or better structured representation of the result, p

might exploit the structure of the cluster hierarchy that is associated with the

retrieval model.

6. Conclusion

In this paper, we have introduced a framework for information retrieval in peer-to-peer

systems. With this proposal of a generic architecture for P2P-IR, we envision to

encourage modular design of P2P-IR systems, enabling resource sharing at differentlevels of abstractions and thus increasing the level of sharing of knowledge and

resources in global information retrieval.

An important study we currently perform is the design of retrieval models that allow an

efficient implementation on P2P architecture. I n principal, the design of the retrieval

model should be logically independent of the infrastructure it is implemented in.

However, we believe that in practice infrastructure constraints cannot be ignored.

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References

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for large-scale peer-to-peer systems. In IFIP/ACM International Conference on

Distributed Systems Platforms (Middleware), November 2001.

C. Tang, S. Dwarkadas: Hybrid Global-Local Indexing for Ecient Peerto-Peer

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C. Tang, Z. Xu, S. Dwarkadas: Peer-to-Peer Information Retrieval Using Self-

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K. Aberer. P-Grid: A Self-Organizing Access Structure for P2P Information Systems.

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S. El-Ansary, L. O. Alima, P. Brand, S. Haridi: Ecient Broadcast in Structured P2P

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S. Ratnasamy, P. Francis, M. Handley, R. Karp, and S. Shenker. A scalable content-

addressable network. In SIGCOMM, Aug. 2001.

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www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/paper/

http://web.njit.edu/~turoff/Papers/webnettalk/webnettalk.htm

www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/Papers

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http://www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/paper/http://web.njit.edu/~turoff/Papers/webnettalk/webnettalk.htmhttp://www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/Papershttp://www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/paper/http://web.njit.edu/~turoff/Papers/webnettalk/webnettalk.htmhttp://www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/Papers

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