ways2know – An innovative tool for knowledge management of ways2go

ways2know assesses the feasibility of a knowledge management tool to be used by the stakeholders in the ways2go research programme initiative. The proposed user-centered development combines leading edge semantic web technologies with tried and trusted content management, as well as providing social software for interaction between members of a community. The research topics of ways2go will be represented in a knowledge map.

The research programme ways2go is funding research into patterns of mobility, sustainable and inclusive mobility and access, as well as work on making different types of planning data interoperable. The proposal presented here is called ways2know – a feasibility study lasting for eight months aimed at providing a software-based demonstrator for a knowledge management platform which will foster collaboration between the stakeholders of a public-private partnership research programme funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT).

Sustainable mobility

The programme calls for an innovative tool to support the stakeholders in growing into a community where knowledge is shared, research gaps and value networks can be identified and where a common understanding of sustainable mobility can emerge, including novel transport solutions which serve society better than is currently the case.

In the ways2know platform we will make use of semantic web technologies in order to structure the knowledge space of the programme, we will support community-building through aspects of social software (e.g. blogs and RSS feeds) and we will use traditional information retrieval to ensure basic content management facilities such as text based search in large document repositories, including references to resources on the WWW.

It is important that the stakeholders “buy in” to the solution provided i.e. that they see a clear utility in the services provided by the platform. For this reason, we intend to conduct the work in a highly interactive manner using an experience prototyping approach which puts the stakeholders at the centre of attention. We are in a position to focus on the user because the proposers have extensive experience in knowledge based content management and tools. The proposers have been called upon in several similar projects where customers required a novel approach to knowledge management and where the task was to combine traditional content systems with innovative and flexible approaches to knowledge organisation.