Some directions for research in knowledge sharing

This paper reviews some issues associated with knowledge sharing, and identifies what the author considers to be potentially interesting and fruitful avenues of future research. The inadequacy of the common distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge is examined, and the importance of providing experience in which the tacit knowledge of the individual can be generated is highlighted. Storytelling, in particular, is identified as one such generation mechanism. The differing ways in which communities of practice may support knowledge sharing and generation are discussed. A link between the health of the communities of practice in an organisation, the nature of its organisational memory, and the ability of the organisation to operate flexibly is hypothesised

Emotions in Hybrid Social Aggregates

Research on emotion has just started to investigate emotions on higher levels of social interaction and aggregation, e.g. organizations or distributed work environments. For a long time the focus has been on the interrelation of cognition and emotion in individuals. But as more and more research is conducted on emotional effects in social interaction, aggregation, and emergence, it becomes obvious that the results are also important for emotional agents (both, natural and artificial) in human-computer interaction. Until now, computer scientific studies – mainly inspired by cognitive science – have designed sophisticated emotional architectures for dyadic interactions. But as emotional agents are increasingly required to engage in social interactions within larger aggregates, either as embodied systems or via multimodal interfaces, the need arises to precisely consider the social-structural peculiarities of emotion. Unfortunately, within the social sciences there is no integrative theory of emotion that interrelates various cognitive and sociological aspects and that computer scientists could use to design improved emotional agents and emotion supporting systems. Therefore, we propose a way to integrate sociological and cognitive theories to analyze emotions on three levels of abstraction: cognitive, interactional, and social structural. We illustrate various reciprocal causes and effects of emotion on the different levels and relate them to urging questions in emotional agents design and human-computer interaction

A Formalization Of Metaphors And Image-Schemas In User Interfaces

. Sound engineering approaches to user interface design require the formalization of key interaction concepts, one of them being metaphor. Work on interface metaphors has, however, been largely non-formal so far. The few existing formal theories of metaphor have been developed in the context of natural language understanding, learning, or reasoning. We propose to formalize interface metaphors by algebraic specifications. This approach provides a comprehensive formalization for the essential aspects of metaphorical user interfaces. Specifically, metaphor domains are being formalized by algebras, metaphorical mappings by morphisms, and image-schemas by categories. The paper explains these concepts and the approach, using examples of spatial and spatializing metaphors. 1. Introduction Metaphor pervades communication. Metaphorical thought, action, and language are not only essential to interpersonal communication [Lakoff and Johnson 1980], but to human-computer communication as well. Sinc..