Editorial Knowledge Processes and Services

With the World Wide Web pervading much of today’s knowledge work, knowledge processes and -services are increasingly enacted in web-based, social environments that are participative, collaborative and dynamic. Web-based social knowledge services, such as weblogs, microblogs, wikis, social bookmarking systems, social awareness streams and others have grown tremendously in recent years, and play an important part in knowledge processes including the creation, diffusion and acquisition of knowledge. Past research in this area has focused on 1) the development of knowledge services that facilitate knowledge processes (such as wikis facilitating knowledge organization) and 2) the development of knowledge processes on top of knowledge services (such as knowledge acquisition from social bookmarking systems). This special issue presents contributions that present fundamental methods and algorithms, technological trends and innovative studies and applications of social knowledge services. The special issue aims to (i) give a selective overview of the state of the art of research on knowledge processes and -services on the World Wide Web, (ii) discuss challenges and opportunities for future work as well as (iii) promote cross-domain communitybuilding. The special issue provides a modern perspective of these topics by focusing on recent or upcoming technologies and approaches for knowledge management. It consists of five papers, each covering selected aspects of knowledge processes and -services. While three articles in this special issue focus on presenting emerging knowledge services that can be expected to have a significant influence on the way knowledge management is being approached and envisioned in the future, two articles focus on important organizational issues by reflecting on the role of knowledge services for organizations, and how to measure their value. The paper “Enhancing Social Interactions at Conferences” by Martin Atzmueller, Dominik Benz, Stephan Doerfel, Andreas Hotho, Robert Jaeschke, Bjoern Elmar Macek, Folke Mitzlaff, Christoph Scholz and Gerd Stumme presents a novel knowledge service developed to augment knowledge transfer and diffusion in conference settings. The authors introduce the RFID-based system Conferator that equips conference attendees with tools to facilitate and augment knowledge transfer and diffusion among users. The paper “Towards Social Crowd Environments Using Service-oriented Architectures” by Florian Skopik, Daniel Schall, Harald Psaier, Martin Treiber and Schahram Dustdar presents a vision of enterprise crowdsourcing as a knowledge service. The authors introduce the notion of “knowledge crowds” and use a detailed scenario to illustrate how knowledge intensive tasks can be executed by large numbers of users in a self-organizing way. The paper “Linked Open Data Perspectives: Incorporating Linked Open Data into Information Extraction on the Web” by Benjamin Adrian and Andreas Dengel provides another example of an innovative knowledge service that links existing (semi-)structured Linked Open Data sources with unstructured natural language text. The presented approach enables users to perform sophisticated knowledge retrieval and exploration activities on unstructured text. The paper “Measuring Knowledge Management Success” by Franz Lehner presents results from a literature review of success factors for knowledge management and discusses a success model for knowledge management that allows for testing the connections between success understanding and success factors. The paper “Broadening Participation in Knowledge Management in Enterprise 2.0” by Andrea Back and Michael Koch gives an overview of the history and breadth of technologies subsumed as web2.0. Based on a definition of the terms web2.0, social software and social media as well as enterprise 2.0, the authors discuss current challenges and issues related to the adoption of enterprise 2.0 technologies for supporting knowledge management processes.