The PDF format is used to allow ease of reuse of figures and text, quoted with citation.
Publication citations are given where a version of the report has been published. Often material has been edited in publication and the cited version differs to some extent.
The Formation of a Knowledge Science Institute in Canada -- The 1985 Proposal, Brian R Gaines, Policy Document, University of Calgary 1985. PDF.
The formation of a Knowledge Science Institute is proposed with the aim of facilitating the world-wide process of change to knowledge-based economies. The Institute will form a network of links with industry, government and universities and facilitate the study, dissemination and application of information on knowledge science and technology and its social and economic impacts. The Institute will facilitate the development of multi-disciplinary studies of knowledge science and technology. The Institute will undertake system development and application projects involving knowledge-based systems, and train and support others to undertake such projects.
Extending electronic mail with conceptual modeling to provide group decision support, Mildred L G Shaw and Brian R Gaines, COCS'91: Proceedings of Conference on Organizational Computing Systems. pp.153-158. ACM Press, New York. PDF.
This paper reports an attempt to move computer-based techniques for supporting the analysis of group cognitive processes and decision-making from being specialist applications to becoming a routine organizational tool used as readily as electronic mail. The objective is to support the discourse processes of functional groups within an organization by enabling them to investigate, analyze and compare the conceptual frameworks of those playing roles within the group. In particular, the system developed shows when individuals are in conflict through using the same term for different concepts, or in tacit correspondence through using different terms for the same concept. It provides support for group knowledge and decision processes as an integrated extension to electronic mail requiring no particular expertise in use or supervision. The work reported is part of a larger study of knowledge support systems merging artificial intelligence and computer communication techniques.
Supporting personal networking through computer networking, Mildred L G Shaw and Brian R Gaines, Proceedings of CHI'91: Human Factors in Computing Systems. Pp. 437-438: New York: ACM Publications. PDF.
RepGrid-Net is a computer-based message system that integrates conventional electronic mail and bulletin board facilities with repertory grid elicitation and analysis facilities to provide both unstructured and structured communications supporting the formation and operation of special interest networks. Users see a mail system in which special-interest networks are specifically supported. The coordinators of such a network provide a basic focus for it through statements of intent, topics and issues which are handled on a bulletin board basis. They also provide one or more kernel grids listing specific topics and the concepts which they apply to them. These kernel grids can be developed by others interested in the groups, using the stated topics and concepts, and adding to them. General similarities between grids are analyzed to provide a socionet of people with common viewpoints, and this may be used to access the mail system to communicate with them. Detailed comparisons of similarities and differences between viewpoints may be made, and individual concept structures can be analyzed.
Manufacturing in the knowledge economy, Brian R Gaines, Proceedings of ICOOMS'92: International Conference on Object-Oriented Manufacturing. pp. 19-36. Calgary, 1992. PDF.
Manufacturing as a process of fabrication is normally considered part of the industrial sector of the economy and not part of the post-industrial, or knowledge, sector. However, the knowledge economy is critically dependent on modern manufacturing technology for its existence, and modern manufacturing has come into being as a result of developments in information technologies. This presentation analyzes manufacturing as a knowledge science in which 'knowledge' is applied to raw materials or components to produce a product, and in which, increasingly, the knowledge is itself subject to automatic processing. This formulation allows the science of manufacturing to be extended to encompass corporate, market and socio-economic issues within a unified framework. It also leads to an analysis of the significance for manufacturing of the knowledge level in software engineering and, in particular, of the impact of the conceptual control of information, its communication and processing through object oriented methodologies. Finally, in terms of future perspectives, the impact and importance of adopting a manufacturing ethos in the overall development of the knowledge sector, and general human knowledge processes, are highlighted.
Using knowledge acquisition and representation tools to support scientific communities, Brian R Gaines and Mildred L G Shaw, AAAI'94: Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 707-714. Menlo Park, California, AAAI Press/MIT Press. PDF.
Widespread access to the Internet has led to the formation of geographically dispersed scientific communities collaborating through the network. The tools supporting such collaboration currently are based primarily on electronic mail through mailing list servers, and access to archives of research reports through ftp, gopher and world wide web. However, electronic communication can support the knowledge processes of scientific communities more directly through overtly represented knowledge structures. This paper describes some experiments in the use of knowledge acquisition (KA) and representation (KR) tools to define and analyze major policy and technical issues in an international research community responsible for one of the test cases in the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) research program. It is concluded that distributed knowledge support systems in routine use by world-class scientific communities collaborating through the Internet will provide a major impetus to artificial intelligence research.
Knowledge systematization in the international IMS research program, B.R.Gaines and D.H.Norrie, Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. 95CH3576-7 pp.958-963. New York: IEEE, 1995. PDF.
The international Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) research program is an attempt to systematize and make operational world-wide knowledge of advanced manufacturing systems as a basis for new paradigms. This paper gives an overview of the IMS objectives, the six test cases to date, and the proposed future research activities. It describes the coordination of the IMS GNOSIS test case, concerned with knowledge systematization to support the full manufacturing life cycle. The systematic acceleration of scientific research was a major objective of the proposed Japanese Human Frontier research program. IMS is one of the first attempts to achieve such acceleration on a large-scale, and the paper concludes with a discussion of the need for system-theoretic models for the complex socio-technical systems involved in international collaborative research.
Mediator: an intelligent information system supporting the virtual manufacturing enterprise, B.R.Gaines, D.H.Norrie and A.Z.Lapsley, Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. 95CH3576-7 pp.964-969. New York: IEEE, 1995. PDF.
Mediator is an open architecture information and knowledge management system designed to provide a flexible technology to support the management of complex manufacturing activities throughout the product life cycle. A heterogeneous environment is assumed in which the sub-systems are geographically dispersed and involve different application packages, not necessarily designed to work together, multiple platforms, protocols and forms of user interface. The function of Mediator is to provide a knowledge support system for all those involved in the manufacturing process from requirements through design, engineering, production, to maintenance and recycling. It is designed to facilitate communication, compliance with constraints including physical restrictions and legal obligations, and to generally represent knowledge about any activity or sub-system relevant to the manufacturing process. This paper reports on a second-generation Mediator implementation based on World-Wide-Web protocols and browsers augmented by specialist helper and server applications.
A networked, open architecture knowledge management system, Brian R Gaines and Mildred L G Shaw. Gaines, B.R. & Musen, M. (Eds) Proceedings of the Tenth Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge-Based Systems Workshop. pp.45-1-45-22. Banff, November, 1996. PDF.
The development of knowledge-based systems involves the management of a diversity of knowledge sources, computing resources and system users, often geographically distributed. The knowledge acquisition, modeling and representation communities have developed a wide range of tools relevant to the development and management of large-scale knowledge-based systems, but the majority of these tools run on individual workstations and use specialist data formats making system integration and knowledge interchange very problematic. The World Wide Web is a distributed hypermedia system available internationally through the Internet. It provides general-purpose client-server technology which supports interaction through documents with embedded graphic user interfaces. This paper reports on the development of open architecture knowledge management tools operating through the web to support knowledge acquisition, representation and inference through semantic networks and repertory grids. It illustrates how web technology provides a new knowledge medium in which knowledge-based system methodologies and tools can be integrated with hypermedia technologies to provide a new generation of knowledge management facilities.
Knowledge management for distributed enterprises, B.R.Gaines, D.H.Norrie, A.Z.Lapsley and M.L.G. Shaw in Gaines, B.R. & Musen, M. (Eds) Proceedings of the Tenth Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge-Based Systems Workshop. pp.37-1-37-18. Banff, November, 1996. PDF.
The GNOSIS project in the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems international research program is concerned with the use of advanced information technology for knowledge systematization to support the complex intellectual and managerial processes involved in the manufacturing life cycle. It has developed technologies to coordinate distributed manufacturing enterprises, and these technologies have also proved useful in supporting the similar intellectual and managerial processes involved in distributed collaborative research. This article gives the background to the project, and illustrates its use of information technology to provide a corporate memory, its use of knowledge acquisition and modeling tools to model the project objectives and conceptual structures, and the architecture of the Mediator system to support knowledge processes in distributed enterprises.
Requirements acquisition, Mildred L. G. Shaw and Brian R. Gaines, IEE Software Engineering Journal 11(3) 149-165, 1996. PDF.
An overview of knowledge engineering research, practice, theories, methodologies, and tools is presented, and parallels are drawn with analogous phenomena and activities in requirements engineering. Knowledge-based systems are distinguished from other advanced information systems by their reflective emphasis on meta-information processing about the basis of system operation. In terms of requirements elicitation this corresponds to an emphasis on maintaining an audit trail from requirements through design, implementation, use and maintenance, that supports continuing user involvement in system specification, design and evolution. Examples of knowledge elicitation methodologies and tools are given, and it is suggested that they all have some applicability in requirements elicitation for advanced information system development. It is concluded that closer collaboration between the knowledge engineering and requirements engineering communities will be mutually beneficial.
Knowledge management in societies of intelligent adaptive agents, Brian R. Gaines, Journal of Intelligent Information Systems 9(3), 1997, 277-298. PDF.
A model is developed of the emergence of the knowledge level in a society of agents where agents model and manage other agents as resources, and manage the learning of other agents to develop such resources. It is argued that any persistent system that actively creates the conditions for its persistence is appropriately modeled in terms of the rational teleological models that Newell defines as characterizing the knowledge level. The need to distribute tasks in agent societies motivates such modeling, and it is shown that if there is a rich order relationship of difficulty on tasks that is reasonably independent of agents then it is efficient to model agents competencies in terms of their possessing knowledge. It is shown that a simple training strategy of keeping an agent's performance constant by allocating tasks of increasing difficulty as an agent adapts optimizes the rate of learning and linearizes the otherwise sigmoidal learning curves. It is suggested that this provides a basis for assigning a granularity to knowledge that enables learning processes to be managed simply and efficiently.
Software Engineering Research Network, PDF.
The Software Engineering Research Network (SERN) was established at the University of Calgary in 1996 to support the dissemination of good practice in software engineering and to promote university/industry collaboration in software engineering research. SERN is a joint venture of the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and is administered by the Industrial Research Software Engineering Chair.
Supporting modeling of the social practices of other users in Internet communities, M.L.G. Shaw and B.R.Gaines in Kay, J. (Ed). UM99: User Modeling: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference. New York: Springer, 77-86, 1999. PDF.
Arguably the most important societal impact of the Internet is its support for special-interest communities. Communication through email and list servers and shared information archives through web browsers and servers support the discourse and knowledge processes of on-line communities in such a novel and effective way as to be revolutionary. Tools are being built that add to the effectiveness of such communities by organizing their knowledge products, supporting awareness of new material, attracting relevant members, and so on. User models need to be developed on which to base the development of effective tools, but these models need to move beyond individual cognitive processes to provide models of user communities and of the relationships between individual and community processes. This article describes research on community processes, the underlying cognitive, cultural, social and media theories, empirical modeling of community processes, and the use of the results to characterize user needs, the dynamic development of user models and support through tools.
Supporting modeling of the social practices of other users in Internet communities, B.R.Gaines and M.L.G. Shaw, Technical Report, 1999. PDF.
Arguably the most important societal impact of the Internet is its support for special-interest communities. Communication through email and list servers and shared information archives through web browsers and servers support the discourse and knowledge processes of on-line communities in such a novel and effective way as to be revolutionary. Tools are being built that add to the effectiveness of such communities by organizing their knowledge products, supporting awareness of new material, attracting relevant members, and so on. User models need to be developed on which to base the development of effective tools, but these models need to move beyond individual cognitive processes to provide models of user communities and of the relationships between individual and community processes. This article describes research on community processes, the underlying cognitive, cultural, social and media theories, empirical modeling of community processes, and the use of the results to characterize user needs, the dynamic development of user models and support through tools.
Organizational knowledge acquisition, B.R.Gaines. Holsapple, C.W. (Ed.) Handbook on Knowledge Management: 1 Knowledge Matters. pp. 317-347. Berlin: Springer, 2003. PDF.
This article develops a model of organizational knowledge acquisition in terms of modern psychological, sociological, economic and management theories by deconstructing the terms involved: an organization as a collective agent having goals and capabilities to achieve them; knowledge as the hidden state variables imputed to an agent as the basis of its capabilities; and acquisition as the reproduction of dispositions. This form of model enables one to relate the knowledge processes involved to existing models of organizational processes, and to understand such phenomena as knowledge economics and knowledge management. The breadth of the notion of organization encompasses markets, firms and societies; the operational definition of knowledge clarifies its role and the utility of the notion; and the focus on reproduction of dispositions in knowledge acquisition enables the management of knowledge acquisition to be analyzed.
Sociocognitive inquiry, B.R.Gaines and M.L.G. Shaw. I.-H. Ting, T.-P. Hong & L. S. Liang (Eds.), Social Network Mining, Analysis and Research Trends: Techniques and Applications, 35-55, PA, USA: IGI Global, 2012. PDF.
This chapter describes techniques for sociocognitive inquiry based on conceptual grid elicitation and analysis using web-based tools, such as WebGrid, which are designed to elicit conceptual models from those participating in a networked community. These techniques provide an interactive web-based experience with immediate payback from online graphic analysis, that provides an attractive alternative to, or component of, conventional web-based surveys. In particular, they support targeted follow-up studies based on passive data mining of the by-products of web-based community activities, allowing the phenomena modeled through data mining to be investigated in greater depth. The foundations in cognitive sociology and psychology are briefly surveyed, a case study is provided to illustrate how web-based conceptual modeling services can be customized to integrate with a social networking site and support a focused study, and the implications for future research are discussed.
CPCS 25-Apr-2012