Organizational Knowledge Distribution: An Experimental Evaluation

Organizations need to leverage their knowledge assets by making them available to their members in an efficient and effective manner. This can be done either by distributing useful codified knowledge to the users as it becomes available or by having users retrieve it according to their needs. We call the first approach knowledge distribution, and the second approach as knowledge retrieval. This paper describes the design, development and validation of a knowledge distribution system designed to facilitate efficient distribution of relevant knowledge to interested users in an organization. The system implements and evaluates the dynamic grouping technique proposed by Zhao, Kumar and Stohr. Dynamic grouping is based on an organizational concept space consisting of user profiles to capture user interests and a network of terms that captures the relationships between the concepts in a domain. Our preliminary result indicates that organizational concept space can improve the precision and recall significantly under certain conditions.