Construction of personal knowledge maps for a peer-to-peer information-sharing environment
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-03-2017-0071 |
| Date | 04 June 2018 |
| Pages | 394-413 |
| Published date | 04 June 2018 |
| Author | Chunxiu Qin,Pengwei Zhao,Jian Mou,Jin Zhang |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Construction of personal
knowledge maps for a peer-to-peer
information-sharing environment
Chunxiu Qin, Pengwei Zhao and Jian Mou
Department of Information Management, Xidian University, Xi’an, China, and
Jin Zhang
School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Abstract
Purpose – Browsing knowledge documents in a peer-to-peer (P2P) environment is difcult because
knowledge documents in such an environment are large in quantity and distributed over different peers who
organize the documents according to their own views. This paper aims to propose a method for constructing a
personal knowledge map for a peer to facilitate knowledge browsing and alleviate information overload in
P2P environments.
Design/methodology/approach – The research presents a method for constructing a personal
knowledge map. The method adopts an ontology-concept-tree-based classication algorithm to recognize a
peer’s personal knowledge structure and construct a personal knowledge map, and uses a self-organizing map
algorithm to cluster and visualize the knowledge documents. The correctness of the created knowledge map is
evaluated with a collection of abstracts of academic papers.
Findings – The method for constructing a personal knowledge map is the main nding of this research. The
evaluation shows that the created knowledge map is good in quality.
Research limitations/implications – The proposed method provides a way for P2P platforms to
understand their users’ knowledge background, as well as to improve the P2P platform environment.
However, the proposed method will not help a peer when he has nothing in his individual knowledge
document repository (i.e. the “cold start” problem). The method also requires a relatively good ontology base
for a P2P document sharing system to use the method effectively.
Originality/value – It is novel that the proposed method organizes the knowledge documents related to a
peer’s knowledge background into a personal knowledge map. Moreover, the created knowledge map
combines the advantages of a hierarchical display and a map display. It has values for a distributed P2P
environment to facilitate users’ knowledge browsing and to alleviate information overload.
Keywords Classication, Ontology, Distributed document sharing, Knowledge map,
Knowledge structure, P2P environment, Self-organizing map
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Knowledge resources management and sharing are essential activities for both
organizations and individuals to improve their competence (Alavi and Leidner, 2001; Balaid
et al., 2016; Lin and Yu, 2009; Palacios-Marqués et al., 2015). At present, most organizations
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71103138 and
71573199). The authors would like to acknowledge the hard word and assistance of Huimin Zhao at
the Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Xiaoyue Ma at the
School of Economics and Management, Xidian University. The authors would also like to thank the
editor and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments.
EL
36,3
394
Received 2 April 2017
Revised 6 August 2017
Accepted 19 October 2017
The Electronic Library
Vol. 36 No. 3, 2018
pp. 394-413
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0264-0473
DOI 10.1108/EL-03-2017-0071
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0264-0473.htm
and individuals use a centralized network structure and a centralized knowledge artifact
repository to store and leverage their knowledge (Cheung et al., 2007). Although this mode
has potential benets for knowledge management, it still has some disadvantages, such as a
single point of failure and the bottleneck of server calculation (Abdelzaher and Bhatti, 1999).
However, the P2P environment can overcome these disadvantages. Schonfeld (2001) states
that the P2P environment is a non-centralized distributed architecture in which each peer’s
functions are both client and server. The P2P computing environment has several
advantages, such as the competence of making full use of resources, extensible network
scalability, robustness, high cost performance and load balancing (Parameswaran et al.,
2001). Therefore, the P2P environment breaks the traditional client-server architecture,
weakens the server role, changes the shared resources storage location from “center” to
“marginal” and distributes shared knowledge resources over every participating peer. As a
typical application of Web 2.0, the P2P environment especially shows the basic tenets of
Web 2.0, which are freedom, equality and interconnection (Xia et al., 2016). Moreover,
compared with the centralized knowledge-sharing environment, the P2P environment is
more similar to people’s actual process of accessing, communicating and exchanging
knowledge resources. The knowledge sharing process in the P2P environment is
accomplished directly between knowledge contributors and seekers. Therefore, the P2P
environment may be more suitable for knowledge sharing for both organizations and
individuals.
In addition, knowledge management in a centralized environment is shown to be
ineffective for sharing knowledge owing to the following reasons (Fahey and Prusak, 1998;
Markus, 2001). First, knowledge artifacts are separated from persons in centralized
knowledge management. That is, identities of knowledge contributors are lost, reputations
or rewards for creating them, which are hard to implement in such centralized knowledge
management, thereby reducing user incentive to share knowledge (Kwok and Gao, 2004).
Second, knowledge producers have to upload information collected from daily jobs
according to a unied format. Third, knowledge seekers have to search knowledge artifacts
according to a xed categorization. In both situations, the inefciency of the storage/
retrieval process would reduce a user’s inclination to share knowledge. In contrast to
centralized knowledge management, knowledge management in a distributed P2P
environment is better related to the nature of knowledge sharing and has attracted more
attention in the eld of information management (Bonifacio et al., 2003; Kwok and Gao, 2004;
Wang et al., 2008).
However, people still face difculties in getting knowledge resources in a distributed P2P
environment. This is because the knowledge artifacts in such an environment are
distributed over different peers and categorized by different views. To facilitate user
information seeking, some efforts have been made previously to deal with the search
efciency problem using semantic methods and collaborative ltering methods for P2P
information searching (Huang et al., 2011; Liu et al., 2015; Nicolini et al., 2017). Beyond
searching, browsing may also facilitate locating knowledge artifacts of interest to users
(Hinson, 2011). Searching is conducted when users have some topics or keywords in mind,
while browsing is adopted in situations where users do not have clear ideas about questions
or when they want to explore unfamiliar areas (Ong et al., 2005). However, there has been
very little research on browsing in the P2P environment (Lin et al., 2009; Sigel, 2004).
A knowledge map, which organizes scattered knowledge artifacts and presents them
visually in meaningful categorizations, can expressively, efciently and effectively facilitate
user browsing, navigating and understanding knowledge artifacts in a large knowledge
space (Brookes, 1980; Lv et al., 2016; Yoon et al., 2010). Knowledge maps have been widely
Construction
of personal
knowledge
maps
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