Motivation

Knowledge management is crucial to the adaptation and survival of organizations in the face of continuous environmental changes [34]. The activities of knowledge acquisition, storage and distribution in a KM system enable the dynamic creation and maintenance of the enterprise intelligence [19][64].

According to KPMG research reports, about 80% companies look to KM to play an “extremely significant” or a “significant” role in improving competitive advantage, and consider knowledge as a strategic asset in business [27]. IBM took four years to reengineer their customer relationships by acquiring and disseminating knowledge to both customers and human experts [36]. Bolloju et al.

proposed an integrative model for building enterprise decision support environments using model marts and model warehouses as knowledge repositories [7]. Schwartz et al. considers that memory-concept associations and e-mail systems should be used to manage organizational knowledge and deliver appropriate knowledge items in a timely and helpful manner [43]. In the last decade, knowledge management has covered a variety of disciplines and extends into many domains and applications.[53]

Surely, knowledge management also contributes many efforts to the field of project management for managing project knowledge. Rubenstein-Montano surveyed knowledge-based information systems for urban planning and suggested the importance of moving towards knowledge management [45]. Tah et al.

applied knowledge management technology to identify project risk and further improve project management [52]. Barthès and Tacla developed an agent-supported portal to organize knowledge in complex R&D projects [4].

Deng et al. developed an integrated information system based on project-specific subjects [14]. Czuchry and Yasin offered a practical integrated informational approach to balance the strategic and operational concerns [12]. Most applications merely focus on the accumulation of projects, index or keyword search functions; however, they overlook the valuable knowledge patterns and working experiences hidden in historical projects. Therefore, extracting the internal knowledge patterns from the collection of previous projects is an

important contribution in this research.

Forming projects to achieve different objectives and works is an essential work-type in most organizations [40]. Internet technology has facilitated project processing across different departments, organizations and even countries. Many enterprises implement various business projects on the Internet. Network convenience significantly encourages processing projects with widespread project resources, such as project teams and systems. However, a project is a ‘temporary’

endeavor undertaken to create a particular product or service, and the project team is usually disbanded and reorganized for another new project [40].

Therefore, knowledge support is highly important in this kind of volatile relationship as developing projects in the distributed environment.

Many researches highlight the importance of projects in organizations [53].

Project accomplishment involves multiple project resources, including people, systems, methods and tools which contain valuable working solutions and experiences. The numerous historical projects are the important knowledge source. The advance of data mining techniques has inspired applications in different problem-solving domains [6][21][18] . Therefore, applying data mining methods to discover project knowledge from the collection of historical projects is essential in this research. The advantage is helpful to avoid committing the same errors and to reuse the practical experiences for efficiently facilitating further project development.

Project is an endeavor in which human, material and financial resources are organized in a novel way, to undertake a unique scope of work of given specification, within constraints of cost and time, so as to achieve unitary, beneficial change, through delivery of quantified and qualitative objectives [53].

Therefore, integrating project resources, processes and performances from the collection of historical projects are required to be organized in a flexible and consistent structure for developing project knowledge in this research [32]. For conceptual deployment of project knowledge and efficient knowledge support, knowledge maps which can visualize and explore complex abstractions is therefore applied for integrating historical projects, knowledge patterns and displaying project knowledge. Many works have proposed flexible structures of

tree or graph for developing knowledge map systems [11][26][29][31] . However, for considering the extension and dissemination of project knowledge on the Internet, Topic Maps, ISO/IEC 13250, is applied as the main structure of the knowledge map in this research. Topic Maps has been referred as the GPS (Global Positioning System) of the information universe. Therefore, Topic Maps which is a standard for representing interchangeable information is herein employed for governing the exchangeability and consistence of knowledge maps.

Effective collaborations of project management over the Internet can thus be facilitated. The advantage not only facilitates the consistence and maintenance of the developed project knowledge, but also improves the meaningful representation and navigation of project knowledge.

Furthermore, as developing project knowledge, not only the attributes of project resources are important, but also the operational information is valuable context for conveying project experiences. Project attributes are useful for indicating what are involved in projects, such as tools and systems. Notably, project context is used for explaining the operational information of how project attributes are applied in projects, such as the location or duration of the system.

Meanwhile, the project context is helpful for increasing the communication as developing the project knowledge. As interacting with users, the project context can provides the basic context conditions for user selection to determine the user information needs. Conversely, undiscriminating responses to all users in many keyword search systems easily impose many disadvantages on users.

„ Users have to spend great amount of time to manually separate the relevant knowledge from others.

„ Users probably miss the important knowledge or make mistakes by manually separation.

„ The internal relationships among the result are not easily discovered by users if without further assistance.

A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service [40]. Temporary means that every project has a definite beginning and a definite ending. Inevitably, a project worker is engaged in different situation among different projects. Therefore, interacting with users is important for

increasing the understanding between the system and users. Since project context provides the operational information and circumstance of project development, such as the location of systems or the role of workers, users can select the similar context to locate knowledge, instead of entering keywords. Different from applying prior knowledge or experiences to enter keywords, the selection of context conditions is useful communication with users. From context perspective to manage project knowledge is practical and valuable challenge.

Therefore, we propose the framework of project-based knowledge map in Topic Maps for consistently describing context-rich project attributes, integrating project resources, discovering internal knowledge patterns and displaying meaningful guideline for user selection to locate the relevant part of knowledge map. Particularly, data mining methods are employed for extracting hidden knowledge patterns. The proposed project context emphasizes the import development annotation from previous project developers and also the useful interaction for further knowledge seekers. The implicit communication facilitates the intelligent service of the framework for responding the relevant project knowledge to support further project development.

Basically, three major stages are herein provided in this research for illustrating the development and evolution of the project-based knowledge map.

The first stage explains the development and the advantage of the framework of the project-based knowledge map. The second stage implements a web-based system for demonstrating the performance, and the third stage applies RDF/XML technology for efficiently disseminating the project-based knowledge amp across various applications over the Internet. Therefore, the knowledge navigation and knowledge exploitation over the network are efficiently fulfilled in the framework of the project-based knowledge map with context information.