Facilitating cooperateve knowledge support by role-based knowledge-flow views

Effective knowledge support relies on providing operation-relevant knowledge to workers promptly and accurately. A knowledge flow represents an individual's or a group's knowledge-needs and referencing behavior of codified knowledge during operation performance. The flow has been utilized to facilitate organizational knowledge support by illustrating workers' knowledge-needs systematically and precisely. However, conventional knowledge-flow models cannot work well in cooperative teams, which team members usually have diverse knowledge-needs in terms of roles. The reason is that those models only provide one single view to all participants and do not reflect individual knowledge-needs in flows. Hence, we propose a role-based knowledge-flow view model in this work. The model builds knowledge-flow views (or virtual knowledge flows) by creating appropriate virtual knowledge nodes and generalizing knowledge concepts to required concept levels. The customized views could represent individual role's knowledge-needs in teamwork context. The novel model indicates knowledge-needs in condensed representation from a roles perspective and enhances the efficiency of cooperative knowledge support in organizations.