Opinion leaders influence the decisions of others and play a significant role in disseminating information, specifically in the domain of e-commerce. Prior studies exploring the factors that affect a person‟s ability to influence others have been conducted in either a work setting [i.e. advice networks] or leisure setting (e.g. movie recommendation). However, it is common for these networks to ...

objectives: the assessment of the elderly’s health condition can help to design interventional studies to promote their satisfaction and quality of delivered medical services. we intended to evaluate health priorities of the aged population of minoodasht district. methods & materials: the data were collected from 119 people aged 60 or over through door-to-door structured interviews containing 2...

BACKGROUND Using measles and tuberculosis as case examples, with a systems thinking approach, this study examines the human advice-seeking behavior of primary health care (PHC) physicians in a rural district of Pakistan. This study analyzes the degree to which the existing PHC system supports their access to human advice, and explores in what ways this system might be strengthened to better mee...

Knowledge Management Systems that enhance and facilitate the process of finding the right expert in an organization have gained much attention in recent years. This chapter explores the potential benefits and challenges of using ontologies for improving existing systems. A modeling technique from requirements engineering is used to evaluate the proposed system and analyze the impact it would ha...

To accomplish knowledge intensive tasks, people in organizations must be able to find the knowledge or information needed to solve complex problems. For this, people often rely on their past experiences, explicit documents, and others who have the needed expertise. Knowledge Management Systems that enhance and facilitate the process of finding the right expert in an organization have gained muc...

131 T he aCaDeMiC Debate on the DeMoCratization of expertise has reached the level of public politics. The U.S. National Research Council, in its study Understanding Risk (Stern and Fineberg 1996), has suggested “collaborative analysis” as a method adding deliberation to risk analysis and risk evaluation, thus opening advisory processes to broader participation. The British House of Lords Selec...

All GPs will have experienced that uncomfortable feeling when they’ve referred a patient for an expert opinion but the response doesn’t seem quite right. You wonder if important details were missing from referral letter, or maybe became miraculously, temporarily, better in Outpatients. Whatever cause, it leaves you with dilemma: do follow specialist’s advice because this is their area of expert...

Air traffic control (ATC) is a complex and demanding job reserved for highly-trained professionals. Training ATC candidates challenging as trainees are subjectively assessed by instructors who biased their own ways of working. As an effort to determine expertise objectively, this study employed clustering techniques on existing data set in which course professional controllers participated medi...

Acknowledgements First and foremost, I want to thank Anthony Di Fiore, my advisor, for all his insightful comments and support throughout the development of this document. Without his support, guidance, advice and expertise this master's report would not have been possible. I will also like to thank Mariah Hopkins for her comments and valuable advice. I truly appreciate all the help and experti...