Title:	DIGITAL KNOWLEDGE ECOSYSTEMS: EMPOWERING USERS THROUGH CONTEXT SPECIFIC ACTIONABLE INFORMATION
Author(s):	Athula Ginige
ISBN:	978-989-8533-54-8
Editors:	Piet Kommers and Guo Chao Peng
Year:	2016
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	Digital Knowledge Ecosystem, Actionable Information, User Empowerment, Design for Evolution, Mobile Based Information System for Agriculture, ICT for Susta
Type:	Full Paper
First Page:	57
Last Page:	65
Language:	English
Cover:
Full Contents:	click to dowload
Paper Abstract:	Today we have to solve many global development problems often termed as Grand Challenges aiming at enhancing livelihood processes for achieving better economic, social and environmental outcomes. Increasing take-up of Smartphones and the resulting digitally connected society has opened up new possibilities to address these challenges. To better understand how this connectivity can be effectively used to enhance outcomes a project was initiated to develop a Mobile Based Information System (MBIS) for farmers in Sri Lanka. The aim was to provide farmers and other stakeholders in the agriculture domain with context specific actionable information to make optimal decisions. The term actionable information refers to such information that will enable a stakeholder to act with least amount of further processing. The research challenge was to discover a way to generate context specific actionable information to support decision making throughout all stages of a farming cycle in a way to empower users. To initiate the information flow published knowledge relevant to the domain activities were disaggregated and reorganised into an ontological knowledgebase to provide context specific actionable information. A system was devised for users to act on this information generating transaction data which in turn was aggregated or disaggregated to provide new actionable information. This mechanism will keep the information flowing in the system similar to biological ecosystems. Thus MBIS evolved into a Digital Knowledge Ecosystem. Since its deployment we observed many new major stakeholder groups joining the system confirming the correctness of the ecosystem design. It was found the evolved Digital Knowledge Ecosystem architecture and the approach to develop the system is very generic and can be applied to other domains such as healthcare and business to enhance information flow among key stakeholders, thus empowering the users.
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