1,721,094 research outputs found
Development and evaluation of a design support system
No full textThis thesis presents the development and evaluation of a knowledge-based Design System.Despite the rise in Knowledge Management research and theories, there is insufficient evidence to conclude if Knowledge Management activities can increase business value. Furthermore, existing knowledge related research was found to insufficiently address the needs of Small to Medium Enterprises (SME).The research develops and demonstrates a suitable knowledge strategy for a design and manufacturing SME faced with a potentially critical knowledge loss from a retiring expert and constrained business growth. The pivotal component of the strategy was the establishment of a codified knowledge base or ‘Design System’, containing product knowledge, best practice guidelines and bespoke design tools to support design knowledge reuse.The system was successfully integrated into the business and a multifaceted evaluative approach applied in a longitudinal study. The evaluation analysed a series of facets including, user behaviour, case studies and financial data. The study found that the Design System led to an increase in business value and successfully protected against knowledge loss.The research therefore demonstrates a successful knowledge strategy that could be adopted by other SMEs and provides evidence of the benefit of knowledge-based systems in design and manufacturing
Knowledge use in an advanced manufacturing environment
No full textIt is now widely accepted that the active utilisation of a company’s knowledge is vital to maintaining competitive advantage in today’s knowledge based economy, particularly within design and manufacturing environments. Despite the rising popularity of Knowledge Based Systems [KBS] to support design reuse, designer’s interaction with these systems is still poorly understood. This paper presents the results of a longitudinal ‘diary study’ to evaluate the role of a KBS in designer’s activities. The results demonstrate the potential for a KBS to operate as the primary source of codified knowledge for designers and can be a viable alternative to verbal knowledge sharing with experts. A KBS is therefore found to be a significant asset for a Small to Medium Enterprise
The inertia problem: implementation of a holistic design support system
No full textThis paper describes and reflects on the implementation of a Knowledge Based Holistic Design Support System – termed “HolD” – into a business environment.The paper introduces the rationale and development behind the system, a consciously different approach to traditional knowledge based systems in engineering in order to meet the requirements of a small business producing bespoke, low volume products.Typical knowledge based engineering systems rely on explicitly codified knowledge which often support product optimisation rather than creative design activities. Such a system would provide little benefit to a business producing bespoke products. Instead, the system presented here, supports the creativity of designers through codified tacit knowledge input by designers as meta-data for past designs.The problem of individual inertia in adopting the system and sharing knowledge was approached early in the construction of the system. The steps taken to lower user barriers and encourage day-to-day use are detailed, including the design of a multi-stage input process designed to interact at key stages of users' existing processes.The immediate results after a 6 month trial period are presented and the results show slower than anticipated usage. In particular designers were found to be reluctant to input detailed information beyond common identifying data and did not attempt to seek information from the system. The reasons for this slower usage are discussed and possible solutions presented. The paper therefore provides industrial based evidence of the inertia encountered when implementing a knowledge system and argues that technology alone is insufficient to overcome this inertia
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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