CPE/CSC 581-S07 Usability and Knowledge Management Assignment 2: KM Body of Knowledge

One of the most important tasks in knowledge management frequently consists of establishing a fundamental collection of terms, concepts, and documents that describe the commonly known and widely accepted domain knowledge; this is sometimes referred to as "body of knowledge." For example, the professional societies in the field of computer science and software engineering are working on such bodies of knowledge:

• Computer Science Body of Knowledge.
• Software Engineering Body of Knowledge.
• Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge.
• Usability Body of Knowledge

In this homework, you need to identify an area within the domain of usability and knowledge management, and establish a framework for the body of knowledge in that area. The task is not necessarily to fully develop the respective body of knowledge; unless you choose a fairly narrow scope, this would be far too much work for an assignment. The emphasis should be on the design of a framework that allows other contributors to add their knowledge, and integrate it with the rest. At the same time, you should utilize tools that make this task easier, and examine their strenghts and weaknesses.

This assignment can be done together with other students such as your project team, and you can select a topic that is related to your project. In order to allow an evaluation on an individual basis, please describe the distribution of work for this assignment. I expect all members of a team to contribute to the assignment, and larger teams should produce more material. As a rough guideline, each person should contribute about 2-3 pages, including figures, diagrams, or other media objects as you see fit for the topic.

You are allowed and encouraged to build upon work done by the 581-S03 and 581-S05 students (see the respective Blackboard discussion forum), or by other people. If you decide to do that, please point out the related work, and what your contributions are.

Here is a list of methods and tools that have been used for similar purposes:

• Ontologies (e.g with the Protege tool.)
• Topic Maps (see also www.topicmap.com/).
• Concept Maps.
• Mind Maps.
• WikiWikiWebs.
• UML.

There are many other methods and tools available, and you can choose one that is not listed above. Wikipedia can also be viewed as a very broad body of knowledge, although the termm is more often used for efforts limited to a specific domain.

Grading Guidelines

• scope of domain knowledge (breadth and depth of the body of knowledge)
• evidence (does the author present facts, examples, or other material that supports the arguments, and are the sources cited)
• complexity of the selected domain (is the collected knowledge fairly easy to capture and present, or more difficult)
• body of knowledge framework (how difficult is it for others to augment the collection of knowledge)
• accuracy (is the material presented correct, consistent, and complete)
• organization and readability of the material (is the knowledge well organized and easy to follow)
• presentation (is the appearence of the material of professional quality, e.g. without spelling or grammatical errors)

Submission

The deadline for this assignment is two weeks after the distribution. It should be submitted via the Blackboard "Discussion Forum" feature; I have set up a discussion forum for it. You should format your document as an HTML file so that it can be viewed easily from within BlackBoard. If you use MS Word or a similar program, please convert it to HTML. It is also a good idea to put all related files into an archive (.zip, .tar), and add this as an attachment since Blackboard is somewhat unflexible with the direct inclusion of files.