SCOPE

In its broadest meaning, a Knowledge Artifact (KA) is any artifact purposely built to enable and support knowledge-related activities. For this reason, KAs come in very different formats and types: a personal recipe notebook is a KA; a cooking manual is a KA; yet also a blog of amateur cookers can be considered a KA. The common themes regard affordances for real and deep appropriation, often cooperative practices of knowledge representation, recording, sharing and combination.
In the last ten years, the interest of researchers from diverse fields has increased towards the design of computational, interactive KAs (what we can denote as Knowledge IT Artifacts, or KITA) i.e., applications and software platforms that specifically support knowledge creation and sharing in cooperative domains [Cabitza & Locoro, 2014]. In all of these research fields authors generally acknowledge the challenges to design for KITA that must be flexible enough to be adapted to the needs of single practitioners and teams, to enable learning and to support decision making.
After the first successful edition of 2015, the workshop of this year focuses on the recent phenomenon of the communities of 3D makers, digital Do-it-Yourself-ers and the empowered consumers. Also in the strand of recently funded EU projects (like the Digital Do-It-Yourself project - http://www.didiy.eu/) we see these diverse actors gathering around digital platforms and social media with which to share knowledge-related and knowledge-intensive artifacts of varying complexity: these artifacts can range from design object models to thread of free-text advices and indications on how to do-things-by oneself, without the help of intermediaries; often these artifacts emerge from just the combination of all of these elements. The idea we propose as interpretative lens of this vast phenomenon is to see

- knowledge-oriented platforms
or
- circumscribed elements that these platforms allow to create and share

as knowledge artifacts that play the role of apomediaries [Eysenbach 2007, Erdem, 2013], that is the role of helping end users and amateurs to either produce or consume a high-value product (be it a good or a service) without the direct intervention of specialized companies, consultants, professionals and institutionalized experts, e.g. medical doctors, lawyers, sale persons, technical specialists (not only in the IT domain, but also in the home and office ones, like plumbers, electricians, accountants).
A recent literature survey (Cabitza & Locoro, 2014), best paper of KMIS 2014, showed how the heterogeneity of the application domains where knowledge must be, either socially or computationally supported, is reflected in a similar variety of artifacts.
Examples of KAs that could be observed and discussed at the KITA workshop are:
=> video-publishing platforms where clips show how to make home repairs and social comments complement this information;
=> online self-diagnosis and medication wizards, also as smartphone app;
=> amateur blogs and fora where novices can ask experts for advices before buying electronic devices and components;
=> wiki pages that are frequently maintained by a community of enthusiasts and give their members tutorials on how to set up arduino equipments or allow for the sharing of 3D printing models with comments and suggestions of the contributors.
=> decision support systems that convey the most pertinent items from the knowledge bodies mentioned above according to the situation or the user requests, profiles and needs;
=> on-line digital platforms enabling an aggregation of firms (a cluster, a supply chain) to share valuable knowledge in order to achieve specific strategic aims (such as internationalization, new product development, lean production);
=> online wiki encyclopedias and manuals that represent objectively, if not structuredly (e.g., ontologically) a body of specialist knowledge;
=> multimedia learning software that integrates different content sources and interactive techniques to have users develop both intellectual and practical competencies on the basis of the knowledge embedded in the artifacts.
=> websites to share 3d printing models or electronic boards specifications (eg: open hardware)
=> social media for virtual communities of practice.
Artifacts from the above classes can be all put on a broad spectrum of concrete applications and interactive system ranging from the most objective ones (where elements are linked to ontological resources and knowledge is algorithmically proceduralized and represented in computational and statistical models) to the most situated ones, where knowledge is created and recreated in the interaction going on in communities of practice, that is in the message exchanges of their members and in the free flows of content and narratives that the KITAs host and help accumulate.

In particular, we are looking for
Contributions from a potentially vast and inter-disciplinary community of scholars interested in this topic, and especially for either full-research or work-in-progress contributions that could report on experiences of either design of a KA, or of its use in the field.
The most appreciated efforts of the contribution would lie in describing the main assumptions related to the nature of the knowledge that the KA at hand are intended to manage or support; in characterizing the main objectives and goals that motivate the KA designers and users; and in extracting both the implications for design and lessons learnt from experience with KA that could fit the interest of a multi-disciplinary community of scholars (across the fields of CSCL, CSCW, HCI, KR, to mention a few) that we aim to coalesce with this first workshop.
In the hope of the organizers, this workshop will set the practice-based foundations to develop a common ground and language by which the "Knowledge Artifact" construct can become useful both to inform the design and to evaluate the impact of knowledge-oriented technologies in the communities of practice that adopt them and adapt them to their ever-evolving bodies of knowledge.

Topics of interest
- Knowledge Artifacts Design and evaluation
- Digital fabrication
- DIY culture in the making economy
- Relationship btw Knowledge Management Technologies and IT Artifacts
- Relationship btw Knowledge Management and Collaborative-oriented Technologies
- Socio-Technical System Theory and Design
- Models, Theories and Methodologies of Knowledge, Collaboration and Learning
- Knowledge and Data Visualization
- Knowledge Artifacts and Collaboration at the firm level in clusters and supply chains
- Learning Technologies
- Business models enabled by Knowledge Artifacts
- Uncertainty representation and management in Knowledge Artifacts
- Knowledge Artifacts and Big Data
- Human-Data Interaction

IMPORTANT DATES

WORKSHOP PROGRAM COMMITTEE

PAPER SUBMISSION

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers in any of the topics listed above.
Instructions for preparing the manuscript (in Word and Latex formats) are available at: Paper Templates
Please also check the Guidelines.
Papers must be submitted electronically via the web-based submission system using the appropriated button on this page.

AUTHOR GUIDELINES

Full papers should be 8 pages long, including references, tables, graphs, images and appendices. Work-in-progress should be 4 pages long, including references, tables, graphs, images and appendices. Submissions with less than 4 pages or more than 13 pages will be automatically rejected. Guidelines and templates available in the main conference Web site (http://www.kmis.ic3k.org/Guidelines.aspx and http://www.kmis.ic3k.org/Templates.aspx). All accepted papers will be published in the main conference proceedings by SCITEPRESS under an ISBN reference and will be submitted for indexation by Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index (ISI), DBLP and Scopus. Selected papers in line with the quality standards of EJIS (European Journal of Information Systems) will be taken into consideration for a fast-track submission.

PUBLICATIONS

After thorough reviewing by the workshop program committee, all accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings book, under an ISBN reference and on digital support.
All papers presented at the conference venue will be available at the SCITEPRESS Digital Library (http://www.scitepress.org/DigitalLibrary/).
SCITEPRESS is a member of CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org/) and every paper is given a DOI (Digital Object Identifier).

SECRETARIAT CONTACTS

KMIS Workshops - KITA 2016
e-mail: ic3k.secretariat@insticc.org