The following table provides an outline for the course schedule.
It lists the topic for a particular week, together with references
to the respective entries in the reading list, and to the assignments
with their due dates. Material will be made available as the course proceeds,
so some links will be broken initially.
Week Date Topic KeywordsDescription Readings Guest Speaker Topic Assignment Lab Activity Project Due Student Presentation Student Commentators 1 Sep 21 Overview,
IntroductionAn overview of the course.
Knowledge and humans: benefits, problems.
Knowledge and computers: knowledge representation, reasoning.
Dealing with large accumulations of knowledge: libraries, other repositories.
Computer support for dealing with knowledge: storage, retrieval, evaluation, visualization.
Assignment 1: KM ToolsIdentify potential topics; team formation; brainstorming of ideas;
previous team projectsName/Topic: Name/Topic: 2 Sep 28 Knowledge Acquisition, Representation and ManipulationBasic principles and methods to enable computers to deal with knowledge:
Transfer of knowledge from humans to computers,
extraction of knowledge from data collections ("data mining"),
representation of knowledge in computers (rules, frames, scripts, meta-data, RDF),
generating new knowledge from existing knowledge (inference, reasoning).
Select topic; Milestone Week 2: Requirements, Testing and Evaluation Plan; teams established; project definition 3 Oct 5 Knowledge Organization Computer support to make the utilization of knowledge easier and more effective for humans:
Balance of conflicting requirements (e.g. levels of abstraction vs. access to specific details);
selection of suitable knowledge organization and presentation methods.
Assignment 2: KM Body of Knowledge Requirements definition, tentative schedule Assignment 14 Oct 12 Knowledge Organization Establishing relations among knowledge items:
explicit vs. implicit relations; special relations such as similarity,
part-of, contains, ...
Methods for organizing knowledge: hierarchies, categorization schemes, descriptors,
ontologies, metadata, Semantic Web.
Milestone Week 4: Prototype 1 (alpha) 5 Oct 19 Knowledge Retrieval Finding and retrieving relevant knowledge items from large collections:
Information retrieval, search engines, relevance ranking. Assignment 26 Oct 26 Knowledge Presentation Presentation of identified relevant knowledge items to the human user:
Text, graphics, animation; visualization techniques,
alternative presentation methods (e.g. audio);
Human-Computer Interface (HCI) and usability aspects.
Assignment 3: Knowledge Presentation and Visualization Milestone Week 6: Prototype 2 (beta) 7 Nov 2 Knowledge Exchange Sharing knowledge between computers and humans:
Knowledge exchange languages,
internal representation of knowledge vs. sharing,
levels of abstraction, details.
Computer-computer vs. computer-human knowledge exchange.
8 Nov 9 Knowledge Interaction Processes and methods that help humans utilize computer-based knowledge more effectively, especially in interactive sessions: Delphi method, process modeling, Semantic Web, RSS, Wiki.
Assignment 4: Knowledge Usability Evaluation Milestone Week 8: Final Version Assignment 3 9 Nov 16 Constrained Access Dealing with knowledge under constrained access conditions, such as
mobile devices, voice-only, limited attention, or disabilities.
10 Nov 23 Ethical and Social Dimensions of Knowledge Consequences on societies and individuals of access (or lack thereof) to knowledge;
intellectual property and copyright issues;
case studies and trends of computer-based knowledge management
in different contexts: commercial, educational,
informally organized (e.g. Web communities)
Assignment 411 Nov 30 Project PresentationsFinal presentations and demonstrations of the student projects.
Project Presentations, Final Documentation Feedback and Evaluation forms Project Presentations Project Presentations 12 Dec 7 Finals WeekFinal exam or equivalent activities
A note about the links for additional reading: The Wikipedia links I have included above under "Readings" contained reasonable and useful additional information on the respective topics when I last checked them (in Sep. 09). The contents may change, however, so you should probably not use it as your only source of information.
Some other links refer to a wiki maintained by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). These articles are typically written by experts in the specific area, but may also be "under construction".