Divisions
Organization and Interoperability of Community Knowledge
The mission of this division is to develop information technologies to help find, access to, produce, collect, store and use information and knowledge resources in the networked information environment.
The areas of research of this division are digital library technologies and data engineering. Some keywords which outline the area of research of this division are digital archives, metadata models, metadata sharing and interoperability, information integration and information space governance, human-computer hybrid information environment.
Formation and Representation of Community Knowledge
Representation of knowledge and information is a critical issue when knowledge transfer and information seeking are considered in knowledge communities.
The mission of our division is "to facilitate knowledge use in the communities by enabling effective representation of knowledge through exploration of its attributes elicited in various contexts". Some of our work include 1) Supporting complex decision making and problem solving, 2) Digitization of cultural heritage and its presentation, 3) Conversation and dialogue analysis, and 4) Cognitive and affective interaction in information seeking.
Communication and Collaboration in Knowledge Communities
This division aims at conducting and undertaking research on "information transfer" as a crucial factor in terms of the relationship with our society and communities.
It can be divided into two categories: (1) research focused on the subject of knowledge, such as exploring people's information behaviors, in terms of the transmission of knowledge (information) created in communities (2) research focused on communication infrastructure as a technology of information organization and a social system for the knowledge (information) transfer The former is to clarify the ways of knowledge transfer in various types of knowledge communities and the evaluation methods and organization designs of each information service institute. The latter promotes research on Institutional Repositories as well as on library service improvement on the basis of user behavior analysis.
Networked Media and Information Resources for Community Knowledge
Archives and data curation in the networked information society are important keywords for this division. An important role of this division is to carry out the research in collaboration with communities in our real world, e.g., memory institutions (i.e., libraries, museums and archives), information schools, regional communities, scholarly/professional communities and industries.
This division was reorganized in 2012 under the new mission - research on social, community, human and technology factors to improve information and knowledge sharing in and among communities.