The EII Taskforce on Context-Aware Computing is organising a tutorial on Management of Knowledge in Context by Prof. Patrick Brezillon, Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6, France.
WHEN: 2-5pm Thursday 1 November 2007
WHERE: Room 420, Building #78, The University of Queensland St Lucia Campus, Brisbane
Speaker: Patrick BREZILLON, LIP6 University Paris VI
Title: Management of Knowledge in Context
Abstract:
From a person viewpoint, KM and ICT address different types of problems, the former being about people, and the latter relationships between people. Actors possess knowledge and communicate information. We are concerned with knowledge. Actors accumulate knowledge from their task realization in a given environment, a particular context and specific conditions. This operational knowledge embeds competences, skills, know-how, etc. that actors use in their task realization in different contexts. This knowledge is highly contextualized: operational knowledge must be considered with its context of use. However, few KM solutions propose to address the knowledge in its contextual texture that is thus generally lost and operational knowledge poorly reused later.
Contextual Graphs are a context-based formalism used in various real-world applications. It allows a uniform representation of elements of reasoning and of contexts for describing different human task solving like diagnosis and interpretation. A contextual graph represents a task realization. Its paths represent the different methods to reach the realization, each method corresponding to a practice (an effective task) developed by an actor realizing the task. We revisit the classical distinction between prescribed and effective tasks, procedures versus practices, logic of functioning versus logic of use, etc. in the light of this formalism. We discuss of the position of the model of practices with respect to the prescribed task (a king of theoretical model of KM) through the example of the diagnosis of a DVD reader and another example in the collaborative building of an answer to questions.
Bio:
Dr Patrick Brezillon defended his Thèse d'Etat in 1983 on "Mathematical Modeling of Self-Oscillating Nonlinear Systems. Application in Biology to Serotonin and Calcium Metabolisms" at the University Paris 6 (France). He then spent two years at Electricité de France, the French National Company of Power Systems. From 1992 to 1996, he was responsible of a team. He is now in the SYSDEF team since the beginning of the Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6 (LIP6, 450 researchers, the biggest Lab. of Computer Science in Paris) at the University Paris 6. Dr P. Brezillon’s research focuses since 2002 on the modeling of context, after a 5-years projects with RATP, the subway company in Paris. He is one of the main instigators of the emergence of an international community interested by the notion of context. He proposes a coherent conceptual framework for defining and identifying context. Now, his two main activities focuses, first, on a software called “Contextual Graphs” for representing in a uniform way elements of reasoning and of contexts describing actors’ behaviors in human tasks (http://www.cxg.fr); and, second, on a Master specialization on “Management of Knowledge, Contents, and Contexts” at the University Paris 6 (http://www.master.management.upmc.fr/specialites/mc3.htm) defending the idea of the role of context in an efficient KM. The two activities are interlocked because actors’ behaviors rely on the operational knowledge that is so difficult to capture in KM.
Contact:
Patrick BREZILLON,
LIP6, Box 169, University Paris VI,
104,ave. du Pdt Kennedy, 75016 PARIS, France
Phone: +33 1 44 27 70 08
Fax: +33 1 44 27 70 00
Mobile: +33 6 10 63 76 96
Web site: http://www-sysdef.lip6.fr/~brezil
