Subject: Conf. on Knowledge Management
From: " (Ulrich Reimer)" <[email-masked]>
To: Multiple recipients of list <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 14:14:07 +0100

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*         -- CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS --           *
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*           International Conference on               *
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*     Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management       *
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*    October 30 - 31, 1996, in Basel, Switzerland     *
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In the following, we first give a general description of the concept
and the underlying ideas of the conference. Subsequently, the call for
workshop proposals can be found.

The conference is supported by SGAICO (Swiss Group for Artificial
Intelligence and Cognitive Science, being part of SI and member of ECCAI).

General Description
-------------------

It is more and more acknowledged that knowledge is one of the most
important assets of organisations. Especially in industrialised
countries with expensive but well-educated employees, products and
services must be outstanding in terms of innovation, flexibility, and
creativity. A prerequisite for being able to face current and future
challenges is the systematic management of the knowledge assets.
Studies indicate that no more than 20 percent of the knowledge
available in organisations is really being used (Bilanz 1/95). What
tremendous effects would it have if we could make use of 30 percent or
more!  Although the technology for an improved management of the key
success factor "knowledge" is ready to use, we can notice that
organisations are widely ignorant of its availability.

Against this background, the conference has two major goals, each one
being associated with a special track.

Track 1: Provide Strategic Information on Knowledge Management (KM)
===================================================================

The conference acts as a communications medium to top executives for
making clear
- what KM is, and
- how KM can improve organisational structures and processes.

To this end, we have a one-day special program for decision makers
that gives high-level, strategic information about both of above points.
The program includes:

Invited Talks
-------------
by well-known experts of their field. They will give overviews of
current KM technology available and will clearly work out how it can
affect organisational change.

VIP Round-Table Discussions
---------------------------
where the top executives have the opportunity to discuss innovative
ideas in an informal setting with the invited speakers and the other
experts.  They can also ask whatever they always wanted to ask about
KM, can formulate their doubts and reservations and will get answers
from the experts.

Track 2: Technology Transfer
============================

This two-day conference track aims at bridging the gap between
application experts who will actually set up KM tools in an
organisation and the technology experts who are familiar with the
technology underlying the KM tools. Thus, the conference will make sure
that those people who will actually establish the KM technology in an
organisation become fully aware of its potential and get a clear idea
what is currently possible (and what is not).

Participants of Track 2 will bring back into their organisations
detailed and well-founded information about KM and its feasibility.
Thus, the information that can be obtained by the participants of
Track 1 and Track 2 is complementary to each other

The main focus of Track 2 will be on workshops.

Workshops:
---------
Each workshop is dedicated to a specific subarea considered relevant
for KM. Contributions are sought that show how a certain approach
solves a clearly outlined, practical problem. The reviewing process
will take care that only those contributions will be accepted which
give clear statements about the main issues and are comprehensible by
those participants who are no experts in the field. To avoid toy
problems and purely academic approaches being discussed in a workshop,
every paper must clearly describe the (real-world) problem being
tackled and what the added value of solving that problem is.

The call for papers for a workshop should contain a description of two
or more representative, practical problems which ought to be used by
the authors of a workshop paper whenever the approach discussed permits
this.

Through the workshops we obtain a valuable compilation of what is
currently possible and what not, what is easy and what is still
difficult, and what is out of reach. Technology experts (and via them,
decision makers) will thus obtain more information about how to design
and install efficient KM at her or his company.

A considerable part of the workshop time will be assigned to compare
the presented approaches. This will be of great value from an
application point of view as well as a scientific viewpoint.

Exhibition and Demonstrations:
-----------------------------
There will be demonstrations of products as well as of running but not
yet commercial systems which can be useful as tools for various aspects
of KM.

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CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS
===========================

We are looking for people with strong theoretical and practical
background willing to organise a workshop on a topic relevant to the
overall conference theme of knowledge management technologies.

In order to share the work and to cover a wider range of practical and
theoretical aspects it might be useful to have two organisers per
workshop. Thus, feel free to submit a proposal together with a
colleague of yours.

Workshop format:
---------------

To help workshop contributors find practically relevant problems and to
achieve a high degree of consistency of the contributions, each
workshop will send out a call for papers with a description of two or
more representative, concrete tasks. Each task covers a real-world
problem being related to knowledge management, and is formulated in a
way that allows a great variety of solutions. Papers are sought which
describe how one (or more) of these tasks can be solved by a certain
approach. The description should be detailed enough for participants
who are no experts in the field to understand the central points.

It may be the case that a certain approach cannot be applied to one of
the exemplary tasks formulated in the call for papers because the
approach is designed to take advantage of the properties of a certain
subclass of tasks and these properties are not given with the exemplary
tasks. In such a case a paper may introduce its own problem as long as
it is a practically relevant one.

Workshop contributions may either present an innovative approach, or an
innovative application of existing technology, or describe an impressive
success story.

Evaluation criteria will be:
- practical relevance (of the problem dealt with and the added value achieved)
- originality of the approach and/or solution
- clarity of argumentation (why and how does the presented approach solve 
  the selected task?)
- how comprehensible is the contribution by participants who are no experts
  in the field?

For the conference proceedings a full paper with a maximum of 12 pages
(A4 .....) must be provided.  The best papers will be selected for a book
on the state of the art in Knowledge Management. An award will be given
to the most significant workshop contribution.

Submission details for workshop proposals:
-----------------------------------------

Please send

at once:
- a short confirmation that you plan to submit a proposal

until February 1, 1996:
- a short description (1-2 pages) which shows the theoretical and
  practical aspects of your work and illustrates how it contributes to
  practical aspects of knowledge management and organisational change
- a publication list, indicating your most relevant papers
- a workshop outline (3-5 pages) which
  * points out the area of KM technologies the workshop will deal with
  * indicates the expected benefits of applying the technology in an
    organisation
  * comprises a description of at least two representative, practically
    relevant tasks

to the following address:
 
  Ulrich Reimer                   email: [email-masked]
  Rentenanstalt / Swiss Life
  Informatik-Forschungsgruppe     Tel.: +41-1-7114061
  Postfach                        Fax:  +41-1-7115007
  CH-8022 Zuerich, Switzerland

You are invited to contact the above address for any kinds of questions
and for further clarifications. A web page is currently being set up.

Possible workshop themes are (feel free to create others):
- Knowledge Retrieval
  (automatic content analysis, information filters,
  supporting the user's query formulation, search aids,
  automatic information condensation, ...)
- Knowledge Integration: integrating different, heterogeneous sources of
  knowledge into one information system
- Data-Mining: automated extraction of knowledge from data
- Supporting business process reengineering by knowledge-based tools
- Using knowledge-based systems to enhance business processes
- Cooperation of intelligent agents
  (supporting distributed human/machine problem solving,
  workflow management, ...)