Mobile Knowledge Management

Researches on Mobile devices are limited on technical issues. As a result of this mobile networks and device are mostly limited to mobile telephoning and email communication.

Knowledge management has quite a history of proofed concepts how to support the user in his daily work, and how to make especially knowledge intensive work more effective.

So combining both research works, knowledge management and mobile computing approaches, new concept called Mobile Knowledge Management, sometimes referred to as mKM.

Mobile Knowledge Management Architecture:

As shown above mobile knowledge architecture divided into four layers:

1. Mobile agent

This human agent interacts with the system to access knowledge. The human agent then utilizes this knowledge, transfer it to others or enter new knowledge back into the system. The knowledge management activities, knowledge presentation and acquisition are the interface between layer one and two.

2. Mobile devices

These devices are java enabled, PDA, or laptop computers. Software in these devices determines the information about bandwidth, screen resolution and location (by GPS). This data sent to contextualizer for specific knowledge.

3. Contextualizer

The contextualizer is a middleware component, which serve as a bridge between human agent and knowledge base. It takes care of communication with the knowledge base (knowledge storage and retrieval) as well as linking the server and client side according to the context (knowledge presentation and acquisition). Contextualizer receive a XML query from the mobile device, it parse the request and analyzes the context accordingly four context elements: user dependency, technological environment, situation and task. Finally the database retrieves the knowledge and sent back to the client application.

Context elements:

User dependency: not all members of an organization work with all available knowledge. The users’ role determines what knowledge they are allowed to and need to access. Authentication and authorization is incorporated within the startup phase. For example, all available data would lead to an information overflow for executive members of the organization. They need an abstract overview of the accessible knowledge

Technological Environments: The technical environment comprises elements of the device and the network. The device plays a major role for the Contextualizer. Variables like the screen size, processing power, available colors, or programming interfaces are key determinants for putting the knowledge into context. The network connection is another important influencing factor. The available bandwidth determines the transferable data size.

Situational elements: Situational elements are those connected with time and location. The time zone is important when retrieving time-critical information from database in far away countries. The position of the user is especially interesting for graphical knowledge representation in maps or sketches.

Task-specific elements: Contextualizer will decide what knowledge retrieves from which database based on task specific elements.

4. Knowledge Base

This layer contains knowledge source which is built up of different database types. In this model I represented three most popular databases: relational database (SQL), Object oriented database and XML database. This layer responsible to retrieve specific knowledge and sent it to contextualizer or insert new knowledge into database.

Mobile Knowledge Management Applications:

· Mobile Knowledge Management helps a professional and car drivers in accessing problems related to car that broken down. There are two scenario for this problem, get the solution for this problem or contact nearest garage.

· Mobile tourist guide: A specific mobile tourist guide application, for example, may provide contextual information to some degree: photos and descriptive textual information are geo-referenced in order to retrieve relevant information for the user at his current location.

· Site inspection support: A mobile workforce application supporting engineers in doing site inspections for maintenance objectives has to follow the specific workflow of the business processes.

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