To integrate the whole student community of VU for Knowledge Sharing
Submitted to: Instructor MGMT630 Submitted by: Muhammad Safdar Niazi MC070200304 Fall 2008 Date submitted: 05-01-2009
Virtual University of Pakistan
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
Ack n owle d gme nts
I express my deepest sense of gratitude to ALMIGHTY ALLAH, Who bestowed upon me the potential and ability to make thanks from the bottom of my heart to The HOLY PROPHET (PBUH), Who is forever a torch of guidance and knowledge for humanity at all times.
I feel great pleasure to express cordial thanks to respected Instructor STA-630, whose guidance encouraged me in writing this project.
I am also thankful to my friends who provided me the help and suggestions when and where needed.
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN
ii
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
Table of Contents
1. ABSTRACT.................................................................................................1 2. INTRODUCTION..........................................................................................1 3. SPAN OF THE PROJECT...........................................................................3 4. EDUCATION SYSTEM................................................................................4
4.1. E-Learning Approach..............................................................................................................................4 4.2 Virtual Community for Students.............................................................................................................5 4.3 Importance of interaction between VU students...................................................................................5
5. P2P-IR ARCHITECTURE............................................................................. 6 5.1 IMPLEMENTATION...................................................................................7 5.2 INDEXING A NEW DOCUMENT................................................................ 7 5.3 DOCUMENT AND CONTENT MANAGEMENT.........................................8
5.4 Document Collection.................................................................................................................................8 5.5 Document Management............................................................................................................................9 5.6 Document Indexing....................................................................................................................................9 5.7 Retrieval Models........................................................................................................................................9 5.8 Retrieval Process with Ranking.............................................................................................................10
6. CONCLUSION...........................................................................................10 REFERENCES............................................................................................... 10
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN
iii
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
1. Abstract
The digital revolution today has carried education into a completely new era where teaching and learning not only take place at institutions but at homes and in the workplace. Electronic Learning provides the ability to harvest the power of technology to make the learning experience more effective and enjoyable. It is about effective integration of technology into the educational system to enhance the learning process. Virtual communities are about more than just collaboration, but collaboration provides the mechanisms through which knowledge is shared and much learning takes place. Community knowledge includes its documents, discussions, decisions, conceptual models, formal educational modules, workflows and processes, and awareness by members of other members’ expertise. Community knowledge also includes the links (relationships)
among all these elements and documents, including relationships among members based on their expertise profiles and similar retrieval and evaluation of other community knowledge resources. This knowledge should develop into a community memory for remembering past experiences, considerations and decisions which has proven notoriously difficult to maintain over time. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems are very large computer networks, where peers collaborate to provide a common service. Providing large-scale Information Retrieval for searching the Word Wide Web is an appealing application for P2P systems. The research community has presented several proposals for P2P-IR. However, so far the concepts of P2P and of IR have been intermingled. In this paper, I propose architecture to structure P2P-IR systems. It differentiates between concepts belonging to the construction and maintenance of a P2P overlay network, and those belonging to IR.
2. Introduction
One of the major arguments against online instruction centers on the misconception that the online format of course delivery is cold and impersonal. Student interaction and engagement are missing; hence, the quality of the learning experience is compromised. Classroom interaction is not a result of the physical structure or instructional format of the course. Interaction is the result of an involved, enthusiastic instructor, and a distance learning program that provides and promotes student interaction outside the confines of the online or distance course. Educational research has proven that the Web-based mode of instruction can be just as personal and engaging as its brick and mortar counterpart, if not more so, due to the anonymity factor the Web lends to the students. Students are more apt
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN 1
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
to express themselves when freed from the pressures of face-to-face interaction within the traditional classroom. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems are very large computer networks, where peers collaborate to provide a common service. Providing large-scale Information Retrieval (IR), e.g. for searching the Word Wide Web, is an appealing application for P2P systems. The research community has presented several proposals for P2P-IR. However, so far the concepts of P2P and of IR have been intermingled. The required architecture is to structure a P2P-IR system. To differentiate between concepts belonging to the construction and maintenance of a P2P overlay network, and those belonging to IR. Furthermore to distinguish basic P2P-IR concepts, which are likely to be needed in all P2P-IR systems, and advanced P2P-IR concepts, that rather depend on the favor of the system? This decomposition of the P2P retrieval process is an important step towards a structured implementation of such systems. Additionally, it allows a systematic sharing of methods and resources needed to perform retrieval. The next generation of global information retrieval systems will combine these distributed resources in new ways to provide more efficient web search.
The World Wide Web opened up new possibilities for people to collaborate. Even so, people and society are not benefiting nearly as much as they could from access to other people and knowledge (Preece 2000). Properly supported virtual communities could bring society to a new level of learning through collaboration and knowledge-sharing in ways we are only beginning to conceive.
Virtuality has several definitions. For some it indicates distance, requiring collaborators to communicate asynchronously (“different time, different place”). For some it indicates the ability of the computer to represent information in ways different from reality, enabling many potential tools for expressing complex or conceptual information in formats that would allow a broad range of different people to understand it and participate in exploring it (Turoff 1997). For some it indicates an organizational (or community) structure that is flexible enough to optimize individual and group performance under new and changing conditions (Mowshowitz 1995; Robey et al. 1998). communities should share all these characteristics. Participation within virtual
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN
2
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
Overall research objective is to understand how to support learning in virtual communities. We will determine how to structure virtual communities so that people participating can improve everyday tasks and activities individually for themselves, as well as collectively within groups and for the community as a whole. We will examine the notion of virtuality; the requirements for and benefits of knowledge support (knowledge building, sharing, management and evolution); and critical mass and sustainability. We will prototype tools to facilitate learning, collaboration and knowledge management. We will develop new evaluation techniques for virtual community research. We will provide test beds for ourselves and for other virtual community research.
3. Span of the project
Web-based learning approach is proposed to improve the self-paced learning of students. In general, K-Share tool is aimed to improve, effective learning process for students. KShare is an integrating knowledge management suit to produce innovative and effective knowledge sharing environment for students. VU Students can get necessary assistance from any experts to solve their queries or problems in the case of virtual learning workplace. According to Kiili (2001), the traditional idea of young student attending lectures and seminars on a daily basis is not the usual solution for getting high education any more. This means offering wide-range knowledge sharing platform reduce their anxiety and improves their confidence in learning things much faster than traditional teaching environment. The reason of the project is to suggest, design and develop a platform to integrate the whole student community of VU for Knowledge Sharing. The community formed by the students of VU student is a virtual community which lacks physical interaction. The platform is suggested a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures which intended to allow autonomous peers to interoperate in a decentralized, distributed manner for fulfilling individual and/or common goals. Peers have equivalent capabilities in providing other peers with data and/or services. Confederations of peers may be forged or broken opportunistically through the choices made by individual peers. The overall performance of a P2P network emerges from local point-to-point interactions of (all) peers on the network. The P2P paradigm in general offers a prospect of robustness, scalability and availability of large pool of storage and computational resources.
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN 3
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
4. Education System
Over the past decade there has been a growing concern about the role of higher educational institutions and how they are meeting the needs of students. Increasingly, higher education institutions are being asked by industry, government and higher education funding bodies to produce graduates with versatile workplace skills, as well as subject specific skills (Luca et al, 2001). In general, the education sector could be described as one where there is slow creation and diffusion of knowledge. The general question is when KM is a driving force for change else where, how is the education system responding and how should it respond? (Walshe,J., 2002).Universities do frame the syllabus and then the affiliated colleges prepare lecture materials for classroom teaching in respective places. The university will conduct the final exam. In this set up, every college prepares their own lecture materials and delivers the same to students. The preparation of lecture material and content may vary from place to place and teachers teach the same syllabus differently. Because teaching is based on the skill of teacher, background of student, method of teaching and teaching aids. Dr. Mahalingam College of engineering and technology is established with Internet and intranet facilities for about 1000 computers for various branches of study in Engineering, Science and Technology. Campus is wired with fiber optic cable with 4-Mbps Internet bandwidth connectivity with redundant capacity. Faculties are trained to use of Internet tools and Interactive multimedia tools for classroom experience since 2001. Video conferencing facility is extended with international institutions for collaborative project work. Since the management has implemented facilities in information and communication technology (ICT), therefore students are doing better learning activities at this institution. The role of the college is to ensure the same level of input to all students equally and also to provide quality learning materials to the students. The lecture content is generally screened and advised by the appointed Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) before delivering to students. Presently, college K-Share system is made available through intranet for students to access the learning content within our institution.
4.1. E-Learning Approach
Web-based learning approach is proposed to improve the self-paced learning of students. In general, Knowledge Share tool is aimed to improve, effective learning process for students. Students are involved to give necessary and feedback about knowledge share during their
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN 4
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
course of learning. Knowledge Share is developed to share learning support materials for the courses of computer science and engineering & information technology. Knowledge Sharing is an integrating knowledge management suit to produce innovative and effective knowledge sharing environment for the students.
4.2 Virtual Community for Students
For many students, the lack of face-to-face classroom instruction can lead to a sense of isolation, loneliness and frustration, particularly when adding the need for good computer and internet skills with sound motivational and learning practices required for successful online learning. Learning anxiety can be increased highly over that of the traditional classroom; and, slightly half of the online students successfully complete their course. This is an industry trend. However, when online students form relationships and partnerships in the learning process, the anxiety level is decreased. In many online courses, students must take the initiative and create their own support system by, for example, e-mailing classmates for help. It’s a hit or miss situation. The Virtual community for student provides a central meeting place, outside of the online classroom, where students can find help and support easily. The Virtual Student Community is a focal point for student interaction and information exchange designed to decrease the learning anxiety experienced by online students as a result of the emotional distance factor induced by the physical distance between students and instructors in online courses.
4.3 Importance of interaction between VU students
The rapid development of computer and Internet technologies has dramatically increased the ways of teaching and learning. Among these new approaches, online Web-based education has become a promising field. Many educators point out the importance of interaction in high quality online education. For instance, Shale and Garrison (1990) state that interaction is “education at its most fundamental form”. In addition, Palloff and Pratt (1999) argue that the “keys to the learning process are the interactions among students themselves, the interactions between faculty and students, and the collaboration in learning that results from these interactions”. Constructivism posits that knowledge is generated or constructed by the learner through his or her interactions in the environment. People build meaning and make sense of their world through interacting with their surroundings. Social
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN 5
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
constructivists believe that learning occurs through social dialog and shared experiences (Jonassen, Davidson, Collins, Campbell, & Haag, 1995). From this perspective, interacting with others and with learning materials seems vital for learners to construct the knowledge internally. In effect, the mind, according to social constructivists, extends beyond the skin.
5. P2P-IR Architecture
In this section we introduce the proposed P2P-IR architecture. Figure 1 show the architecture, which consists of four layers. Each layer can be conceived as a space of objects with a specific topology (e.g. a similarity measure or distance function), and with certain operations to access and manipulate these objects. Each layer primarily uses operations of the layer underneath it to implement its operations. Objects at higher layers are related to (one or more) objects at lower layers. The problem of P2P-IR consists essentially in locating document objects (on layer 4) that are semantically close to a given document (respectively query) at peers (on layer 1) that store these documents. On layer 4, the objects are documents. The ranking functions of specific IR models dense the semantic distance between two documents. The algorithms of these ranking functions are typically based on computations performed on keys (short for keyword sets), which are extracted from the documents. Keys are the objects on layer 3 and serve as the building blocks for semantic distance on layer 4. In a P2P system a large number of peers share resources (and the execution of tasks on them). The key idea of structured P2P overlay networks is to partition resources. We achieve such a partitioning by associating peers and resources with indenters from the same (application-specific) space. The basic function of a structured overlay network is to efficiently route resource requests, which any peer can submit, to responsible peers in the network. In the literature this service is referred to as key-based routing (KBR) 1 [2]. By mapping keys of layer 3 to indenters of layer 2, we associate certain document management tasks to specific peers. In this paper, we concentrate on structured overlay networks for layer 2. An adaptation to unstructured overlays is part of future work. The purpose of layer 2 is to provide a logical network, which is independent of the inherent dynamics (e.g. because of network failures, dynamic IP, or mobility of peers) of the physical network (layer 1). The reason for choosing different spaces for indenters on layer 2 and keys on layer 3 is that methods for managing a structured overlay network impose certain properties on the indenter space that are not necessarily satisfied by a key space, which has to full IR requirements. Nevertheless, mappings with distance-preserving
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN 6
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
properties are an important tool for optimizations in P2P-IR. Similarly, distance-preserving mappings from indenters on layer 2 to physical addresses on layer 1 support optimizations of the physical access to peers.
Fig. 1. P2P-IR Architecture
5.1 Implementation
In this section we sketch how typical retrieval tasks, namely document indexing and document retrieval, are implemented using our layered architecture.
5.2 Indexing a new Document
The following steps are taken upon insertion of a new document. Even if a peer holds documents that are only accessible to authenticated users, it can still index these documents to make them searchable.
1. A peer p on layer 4 decides to include a document into a search engine using a
specific retrieval model. It uses a function to generate the document digest, i.e. the keys and associated statistics representing the document according to the retrieval model. p also provides the cluster(s) in which the document should be included, respectively decides to create a new cluster for the document. It generates a unique key for the document.
2. For implementing the layer-4 operations, p retrieves through layer 3 the cluster ___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN 7
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
hierarchy and vocabulary that the retrieval model is based on. These queries are routed on layer 2 as payload to the corresponding peers and require the layer-3 support functions for converting document and cluster indenters into layer-2 indenters. The receiving peers interpret the payload using their local document management functions and return the results (either directly or by routing). 3. The document is now included on layer 3 into the document collection and associated with the corresponding cluster(s). Next the new or up-dated cluster digest is inserted into the posting list.
4. For inserting a new cluster digest into a posting list, layer-2 routing is used and the
keys are converted into layer-2 indenters.
5. The insertion of new documents also triggers updates on the statistics of the
vocabulary. Depending on the usage patterns, vocabularies are possibly widely replicated. Therefore broadcast functions may be used to perform these updates efficiently.
5.3 Document and Content Management
Independent of which semantic models are used for retrieval, certain tasks of document management are common to all models and will serve as building blocks for the dentition of retrieval models. Such common tasks are, for example, maintaining a distributed document repository, associating term sets with documents, maintaining vocabularies, and cluster hierarchies. We therefore separately identify these tasks through a set of generic primitives that view documents as structured data objects. The specific choice of these primitives has been driven by an analysis of the needs of common retrieval models and by the principle of providing a simple, yet sufficiently powerful model to satisfy the needs of a wide range of models. In particular, we identify share-able resources and address issues of distribution. The distributed, and thus scalable, implementation of such functions relies on the primitives provided through structured overlay networks on layer 2. From these primitives we derive interfaces, which layer 3 provides to upper layers.
5.4 Document Collection
The P2P network provides the capability to store and retrieve documents based on unique
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN 8
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
indenters associated with documents. A document is a string, which is not further interpreted, and represents the smallest addressing granularity.
5.5 Document Management
Document management allows adding and deleting documents from the document collection. A document is always accessible by its unique indenter.
5.6 Document Indexing
An application can join documents from the collection into any cluster using a method associate. This association method indexes the document in the cluster, i.e. it generates a document representation, which consists of a document digest and keys for indexing. The document is indexed for all vocabularies that are associated with the cluster hierarchy of the cluster. In addition, the corresponding vocabularies have to update the statistical information they maintain. Note that a vocabulary is potentially replicated over many peers. Such an indexing operation may therefore affect a number of different peers. Efficient maintenance strategies for vocabularies will thus be a key element of successful implementations of P2P-IR systems.
5.7 Retrieval Models
Different retrieval models use the same document and content management functions of layer 3. Thus, it is important to have a common framework, in which we can capture the model we would like to use. Such a framework characterizes notions like ranking, relevance, rank aggregation, etc. and should be probabilistic (in some sense). Basic concepts on layer 4 are the representation of user queries, the provision of ranking and clustering functions, and interfaces for basic information retrieval tasks. Layer 4 provides functions for constructing vocabularies and document indexing, such as extracting keys from documents. The implementation of these functions relies on the services provided by layer 3. Due to space limitations we omit a detailed specification of this layer.
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN
9
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
5.8 Retrieval Process w i t h Ranking
The following steps are performed when retrieving a document:
1. On layer 4 a peer p receives a query for the retrieval of documents ac-cording to a
specific retrieval model.
2. The peer p needs access to the relevant vocabulary to obtain global information on
distributional properties of keys. Therefore p performs a search for a peer that stores such a vocabulary.
3.
p generates a set of query keys from the application query.
4. The set of query keys is used to retrieve the posting lists using the layer-3 function
r e t r i e v e ( ) , which in turn is executed by using layer-2 routing functionality.
5. After having retrieved the posting lists, which are possibly pre-ltered, p (on layer 4)
computes the ranked result according to the specific retrieval model.
6. For producing a more compact or better structured representation of the result, p
might exploit the structure of the cluster hierarchy that is associated with the retrieval model.
6. Conclusion
In this paper, we have introduced a framework for information retrieval in peer-to-peer systems. With this proposal of a generic architecture for P2P-IR, we envision to encourage modular design of P2P-IR systems, enabling resource sharing at different levels of abstractions and thus increasing the level of sharing of knowledge and resources in global information retrieval. An important study we currently perform is the design of retrieval models that allow an efficient implementation on P2P architecture. In principal, the design of the retrieval model should be logically independent of the infrastructure it is implemented in. However, we believe that in practice infrastructure constraints cannot be ignored.
References
A. Loser, W. Nejdl, M. Wolpers, and W. Siberski: Information integration in schemabased peer-to-peer networks. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference On Advanced
___________________________________________________________________________ 10 VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
Information Systems Engineering (CAISE 03) (Klagenfurt/Velden, Austria, June 2003). A. Rowstron and P. Druschel. Pastry: Scalable, distributed object location and routing for large-scale peer-to-peer systems. In IFIP/ACM International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms (Middleware), November 2001. C. Tang, S. Dwarkadas: Hybrid Global-Local Indexing for Ecient Peerto-Peer Information Retrieval. First Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI04), San Francisco, March 2004. C. Tang, Z. Xu, S. Dwarkadas: Peer-to-Peer Information Retrieval Using SelfOrganizing Semantic Overlay Networks. SIGCOMM 2003 F. Dabek, B. Zhao, P. Druschel, and I. Stoica: Towards a common API for structured Peer-to-Peer overlays. In 2nd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS02), Feb. 2003. F. Klemm, A. Datta, K. Aberer: A Query-Adaptive Partial Distributed Hash Table for Peer-to-Peer Systems. International Workshop on Peerto-Peer Computing & DataBases (P2P&DB 2004), Crete, Greece, March 2004 I. Stoica, R. Morris, D. Karger, M. F. Kaashoek, and H. Balakrishnan. Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 2001. J. Lu, and J. Callan: Content-based retrieval in hybrid peer-to-peer net-works. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM03). New Orleans, 2003 K. Aberer. P-Grid: A Self-Organizing Access Structure for P2P Information Systems. Sixth Inter-national Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS 2001), Trento, Italy 2001. S. El-Ansary, L. O. Alima, P. Brand, S. Haridi: Ecient Broadcast in Structured P2P Networks. 2nd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS 03), Berkeley, CA, USA, 2003 S. Ratnasamy, P. Francis, M. Handley, R. Karp, and S. Shenker. A scalable contentaddressable network. In SIGCOMM, Aug. 2001.
www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/paper/ http://web.njit.edu/~turoff/Papers/webnettalk/webnettalk.htm
___________________________________________________________________________ 11 VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/Papers
___________________________________________________________________________ 12 VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN
doc_659948010.doc
Submitted to: Instructor MGMT630 Submitted by: Muhammad Safdar Niazi MC070200304 Fall 2008 Date submitted: 05-01-2009
Virtual University of Pakistan
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
Ack n owle d gme nts
I express my deepest sense of gratitude to ALMIGHTY ALLAH, Who bestowed upon me the potential and ability to make thanks from the bottom of my heart to The HOLY PROPHET (PBUH), Who is forever a torch of guidance and knowledge for humanity at all times.
I feel great pleasure to express cordial thanks to respected Instructor STA-630, whose guidance encouraged me in writing this project.
I am also thankful to my friends who provided me the help and suggestions when and where needed.
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN
ii
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
Table of Contents
1. ABSTRACT.................................................................................................1 2. INTRODUCTION..........................................................................................1 3. SPAN OF THE PROJECT...........................................................................3 4. EDUCATION SYSTEM................................................................................4
4.1. E-Learning Approach..............................................................................................................................4 4.2 Virtual Community for Students.............................................................................................................5 4.3 Importance of interaction between VU students...................................................................................5
5. P2P-IR ARCHITECTURE............................................................................. 6 5.1 IMPLEMENTATION...................................................................................7 5.2 INDEXING A NEW DOCUMENT................................................................ 7 5.3 DOCUMENT AND CONTENT MANAGEMENT.........................................8
5.4 Document Collection.................................................................................................................................8 5.5 Document Management............................................................................................................................9 5.6 Document Indexing....................................................................................................................................9 5.7 Retrieval Models........................................................................................................................................9 5.8 Retrieval Process with Ranking.............................................................................................................10
6. CONCLUSION...........................................................................................10 REFERENCES............................................................................................... 10
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN
iii
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
1. Abstract
The digital revolution today has carried education into a completely new era where teaching and learning not only take place at institutions but at homes and in the workplace. Electronic Learning provides the ability to harvest the power of technology to make the learning experience more effective and enjoyable. It is about effective integration of technology into the educational system to enhance the learning process. Virtual communities are about more than just collaboration, but collaboration provides the mechanisms through which knowledge is shared and much learning takes place. Community knowledge includes its documents, discussions, decisions, conceptual models, formal educational modules, workflows and processes, and awareness by members of other members’ expertise. Community knowledge also includes the links (relationships)
among all these elements and documents, including relationships among members based on their expertise profiles and similar retrieval and evaluation of other community knowledge resources. This knowledge should develop into a community memory for remembering past experiences, considerations and decisions which has proven notoriously difficult to maintain over time. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems are very large computer networks, where peers collaborate to provide a common service. Providing large-scale Information Retrieval for searching the Word Wide Web is an appealing application for P2P systems. The research community has presented several proposals for P2P-IR. However, so far the concepts of P2P and of IR have been intermingled. In this paper, I propose architecture to structure P2P-IR systems. It differentiates between concepts belonging to the construction and maintenance of a P2P overlay network, and those belonging to IR.
2. Introduction
One of the major arguments against online instruction centers on the misconception that the online format of course delivery is cold and impersonal. Student interaction and engagement are missing; hence, the quality of the learning experience is compromised. Classroom interaction is not a result of the physical structure or instructional format of the course. Interaction is the result of an involved, enthusiastic instructor, and a distance learning program that provides and promotes student interaction outside the confines of the online or distance course. Educational research has proven that the Web-based mode of instruction can be just as personal and engaging as its brick and mortar counterpart, if not more so, due to the anonymity factor the Web lends to the students. Students are more apt
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN 1
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
to express themselves when freed from the pressures of face-to-face interaction within the traditional classroom. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems are very large computer networks, where peers collaborate to provide a common service. Providing large-scale Information Retrieval (IR), e.g. for searching the Word Wide Web, is an appealing application for P2P systems. The research community has presented several proposals for P2P-IR. However, so far the concepts of P2P and of IR have been intermingled. The required architecture is to structure a P2P-IR system. To differentiate between concepts belonging to the construction and maintenance of a P2P overlay network, and those belonging to IR. Furthermore to distinguish basic P2P-IR concepts, which are likely to be needed in all P2P-IR systems, and advanced P2P-IR concepts, that rather depend on the favor of the system? This decomposition of the P2P retrieval process is an important step towards a structured implementation of such systems. Additionally, it allows a systematic sharing of methods and resources needed to perform retrieval. The next generation of global information retrieval systems will combine these distributed resources in new ways to provide more efficient web search.
The World Wide Web opened up new possibilities for people to collaborate. Even so, people and society are not benefiting nearly as much as they could from access to other people and knowledge (Preece 2000). Properly supported virtual communities could bring society to a new level of learning through collaboration and knowledge-sharing in ways we are only beginning to conceive.
Virtuality has several definitions. For some it indicates distance, requiring collaborators to communicate asynchronously (“different time, different place”). For some it indicates the ability of the computer to represent information in ways different from reality, enabling many potential tools for expressing complex or conceptual information in formats that would allow a broad range of different people to understand it and participate in exploring it (Turoff 1997). For some it indicates an organizational (or community) structure that is flexible enough to optimize individual and group performance under new and changing conditions (Mowshowitz 1995; Robey et al. 1998). communities should share all these characteristics. Participation within virtual
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN
2
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
Overall research objective is to understand how to support learning in virtual communities. We will determine how to structure virtual communities so that people participating can improve everyday tasks and activities individually for themselves, as well as collectively within groups and for the community as a whole. We will examine the notion of virtuality; the requirements for and benefits of knowledge support (knowledge building, sharing, management and evolution); and critical mass and sustainability. We will prototype tools to facilitate learning, collaboration and knowledge management. We will develop new evaluation techniques for virtual community research. We will provide test beds for ourselves and for other virtual community research.
3. Span of the project
Web-based learning approach is proposed to improve the self-paced learning of students. In general, K-Share tool is aimed to improve, effective learning process for students. KShare is an integrating knowledge management suit to produce innovative and effective knowledge sharing environment for students. VU Students can get necessary assistance from any experts to solve their queries or problems in the case of virtual learning workplace. According to Kiili (2001), the traditional idea of young student attending lectures and seminars on a daily basis is not the usual solution for getting high education any more. This means offering wide-range knowledge sharing platform reduce their anxiety and improves their confidence in learning things much faster than traditional teaching environment. The reason of the project is to suggest, design and develop a platform to integrate the whole student community of VU for Knowledge Sharing. The community formed by the students of VU student is a virtual community which lacks physical interaction. The platform is suggested a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures which intended to allow autonomous peers to interoperate in a decentralized, distributed manner for fulfilling individual and/or common goals. Peers have equivalent capabilities in providing other peers with data and/or services. Confederations of peers may be forged or broken opportunistically through the choices made by individual peers. The overall performance of a P2P network emerges from local point-to-point interactions of (all) peers on the network. The P2P paradigm in general offers a prospect of robustness, scalability and availability of large pool of storage and computational resources.
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN 3
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
4. Education System
Over the past decade there has been a growing concern about the role of higher educational institutions and how they are meeting the needs of students. Increasingly, higher education institutions are being asked by industry, government and higher education funding bodies to produce graduates with versatile workplace skills, as well as subject specific skills (Luca et al, 2001). In general, the education sector could be described as one where there is slow creation and diffusion of knowledge. The general question is when KM is a driving force for change else where, how is the education system responding and how should it respond? (Walshe,J., 2002).Universities do frame the syllabus and then the affiliated colleges prepare lecture materials for classroom teaching in respective places. The university will conduct the final exam. In this set up, every college prepares their own lecture materials and delivers the same to students. The preparation of lecture material and content may vary from place to place and teachers teach the same syllabus differently. Because teaching is based on the skill of teacher, background of student, method of teaching and teaching aids. Dr. Mahalingam College of engineering and technology is established with Internet and intranet facilities for about 1000 computers for various branches of study in Engineering, Science and Technology. Campus is wired with fiber optic cable with 4-Mbps Internet bandwidth connectivity with redundant capacity. Faculties are trained to use of Internet tools and Interactive multimedia tools for classroom experience since 2001. Video conferencing facility is extended with international institutions for collaborative project work. Since the management has implemented facilities in information and communication technology (ICT), therefore students are doing better learning activities at this institution. The role of the college is to ensure the same level of input to all students equally and also to provide quality learning materials to the students. The lecture content is generally screened and advised by the appointed Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) before delivering to students. Presently, college K-Share system is made available through intranet for students to access the learning content within our institution.
4.1. E-Learning Approach
Web-based learning approach is proposed to improve the self-paced learning of students. In general, Knowledge Share tool is aimed to improve, effective learning process for students. Students are involved to give necessary and feedback about knowledge share during their
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN 4
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
course of learning. Knowledge Share is developed to share learning support materials for the courses of computer science and engineering & information technology. Knowledge Sharing is an integrating knowledge management suit to produce innovative and effective knowledge sharing environment for the students.
4.2 Virtual Community for Students
For many students, the lack of face-to-face classroom instruction can lead to a sense of isolation, loneliness and frustration, particularly when adding the need for good computer and internet skills with sound motivational and learning practices required for successful online learning. Learning anxiety can be increased highly over that of the traditional classroom; and, slightly half of the online students successfully complete their course. This is an industry trend. However, when online students form relationships and partnerships in the learning process, the anxiety level is decreased. In many online courses, students must take the initiative and create their own support system by, for example, e-mailing classmates for help. It’s a hit or miss situation. The Virtual community for student provides a central meeting place, outside of the online classroom, where students can find help and support easily. The Virtual Student Community is a focal point for student interaction and information exchange designed to decrease the learning anxiety experienced by online students as a result of the emotional distance factor induced by the physical distance between students and instructors in online courses.
4.3 Importance of interaction between VU students
The rapid development of computer and Internet technologies has dramatically increased the ways of teaching and learning. Among these new approaches, online Web-based education has become a promising field. Many educators point out the importance of interaction in high quality online education. For instance, Shale and Garrison (1990) state that interaction is “education at its most fundamental form”. In addition, Palloff and Pratt (1999) argue that the “keys to the learning process are the interactions among students themselves, the interactions between faculty and students, and the collaboration in learning that results from these interactions”. Constructivism posits that knowledge is generated or constructed by the learner through his or her interactions in the environment. People build meaning and make sense of their world through interacting with their surroundings. Social
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN 5
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
constructivists believe that learning occurs through social dialog and shared experiences (Jonassen, Davidson, Collins, Campbell, & Haag, 1995). From this perspective, interacting with others and with learning materials seems vital for learners to construct the knowledge internally. In effect, the mind, according to social constructivists, extends beyond the skin.
5. P2P-IR Architecture
In this section we introduce the proposed P2P-IR architecture. Figure 1 show the architecture, which consists of four layers. Each layer can be conceived as a space of objects with a specific topology (e.g. a similarity measure or distance function), and with certain operations to access and manipulate these objects. Each layer primarily uses operations of the layer underneath it to implement its operations. Objects at higher layers are related to (one or more) objects at lower layers. The problem of P2P-IR consists essentially in locating document objects (on layer 4) that are semantically close to a given document (respectively query) at peers (on layer 1) that store these documents. On layer 4, the objects are documents. The ranking functions of specific IR models dense the semantic distance between two documents. The algorithms of these ranking functions are typically based on computations performed on keys (short for keyword sets), which are extracted from the documents. Keys are the objects on layer 3 and serve as the building blocks for semantic distance on layer 4. In a P2P system a large number of peers share resources (and the execution of tasks on them). The key idea of structured P2P overlay networks is to partition resources. We achieve such a partitioning by associating peers and resources with indenters from the same (application-specific) space. The basic function of a structured overlay network is to efficiently route resource requests, which any peer can submit, to responsible peers in the network. In the literature this service is referred to as key-based routing (KBR) 1 [2]. By mapping keys of layer 3 to indenters of layer 2, we associate certain document management tasks to specific peers. In this paper, we concentrate on structured overlay networks for layer 2. An adaptation to unstructured overlays is part of future work. The purpose of layer 2 is to provide a logical network, which is independent of the inherent dynamics (e.g. because of network failures, dynamic IP, or mobility of peers) of the physical network (layer 1). The reason for choosing different spaces for indenters on layer 2 and keys on layer 3 is that methods for managing a structured overlay network impose certain properties on the indenter space that are not necessarily satisfied by a key space, which has to full IR requirements. Nevertheless, mappings with distance-preserving
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN 6
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
properties are an important tool for optimizations in P2P-IR. Similarly, distance-preserving mappings from indenters on layer 2 to physical addresses on layer 1 support optimizations of the physical access to peers.
Fig. 1. P2P-IR Architecture
5.1 Implementation
In this section we sketch how typical retrieval tasks, namely document indexing and document retrieval, are implemented using our layered architecture.
5.2 Indexing a new Document
The following steps are taken upon insertion of a new document. Even if a peer holds documents that are only accessible to authenticated users, it can still index these documents to make them searchable.
1. A peer p on layer 4 decides to include a document into a search engine using a
specific retrieval model. It uses a function to generate the document digest, i.e. the keys and associated statistics representing the document according to the retrieval model. p also provides the cluster(s) in which the document should be included, respectively decides to create a new cluster for the document. It generates a unique key for the document.
2. For implementing the layer-4 operations, p retrieves through layer 3 the cluster ___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN 7
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
hierarchy and vocabulary that the retrieval model is based on. These queries are routed on layer 2 as payload to the corresponding peers and require the layer-3 support functions for converting document and cluster indenters into layer-2 indenters. The receiving peers interpret the payload using their local document management functions and return the results (either directly or by routing). 3. The document is now included on layer 3 into the document collection and associated with the corresponding cluster(s). Next the new or up-dated cluster digest is inserted into the posting list.
4. For inserting a new cluster digest into a posting list, layer-2 routing is used and the
keys are converted into layer-2 indenters.
5. The insertion of new documents also triggers updates on the statistics of the
vocabulary. Depending on the usage patterns, vocabularies are possibly widely replicated. Therefore broadcast functions may be used to perform these updates efficiently.
5.3 Document and Content Management
Independent of which semantic models are used for retrieval, certain tasks of document management are common to all models and will serve as building blocks for the dentition of retrieval models. Such common tasks are, for example, maintaining a distributed document repository, associating term sets with documents, maintaining vocabularies, and cluster hierarchies. We therefore separately identify these tasks through a set of generic primitives that view documents as structured data objects. The specific choice of these primitives has been driven by an analysis of the needs of common retrieval models and by the principle of providing a simple, yet sufficiently powerful model to satisfy the needs of a wide range of models. In particular, we identify share-able resources and address issues of distribution. The distributed, and thus scalable, implementation of such functions relies on the primitives provided through structured overlay networks on layer 2. From these primitives we derive interfaces, which layer 3 provides to upper layers.
5.4 Document Collection
The P2P network provides the capability to store and retrieve documents based on unique
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN 8
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
indenters associated with documents. A document is a string, which is not further interpreted, and represents the smallest addressing granularity.
5.5 Document Management
Document management allows adding and deleting documents from the document collection. A document is always accessible by its unique indenter.
5.6 Document Indexing
An application can join documents from the collection into any cluster using a method associate. This association method indexes the document in the cluster, i.e. it generates a document representation, which consists of a document digest and keys for indexing. The document is indexed for all vocabularies that are associated with the cluster hierarchy of the cluster. In addition, the corresponding vocabularies have to update the statistical information they maintain. Note that a vocabulary is potentially replicated over many peers. Such an indexing operation may therefore affect a number of different peers. Efficient maintenance strategies for vocabularies will thus be a key element of successful implementations of P2P-IR systems.
5.7 Retrieval Models
Different retrieval models use the same document and content management functions of layer 3. Thus, it is important to have a common framework, in which we can capture the model we would like to use. Such a framework characterizes notions like ranking, relevance, rank aggregation, etc. and should be probabilistic (in some sense). Basic concepts on layer 4 are the representation of user queries, the provision of ranking and clustering functions, and interfaces for basic information retrieval tasks. Layer 4 provides functions for constructing vocabularies and document indexing, such as extracting keys from documents. The implementation of these functions relies on the services provided by layer 3. Due to space limitations we omit a detailed specification of this layer.
___________________________________________________________________________ VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN
9
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
5.8 Retrieval Process w i t h Ranking
The following steps are performed when retrieving a document:
1. On layer 4 a peer p receives a query for the retrieval of documents ac-cording to a
specific retrieval model.
2. The peer p needs access to the relevant vocabulary to obtain global information on
distributional properties of keys. Therefore p performs a search for a peer that stores such a vocabulary.
3.
p generates a set of query keys from the application query.
4. The set of query keys is used to retrieve the posting lists using the layer-3 function
r e t r i e v e ( ) , which in turn is executed by using layer-2 routing functionality.
5. After having retrieved the posting lists, which are possibly pre-ltered, p (on layer 4)
computes the ranked result according to the specific retrieval model.
6. For producing a more compact or better structured representation of the result, p
might exploit the structure of the cluster hierarchy that is associated with the retrieval model.
6. Conclusion
In this paper, we have introduced a framework for information retrieval in peer-to-peer systems. With this proposal of a generic architecture for P2P-IR, we envision to encourage modular design of P2P-IR systems, enabling resource sharing at different levels of abstractions and thus increasing the level of sharing of knowledge and resources in global information retrieval. An important study we currently perform is the design of retrieval models that allow an efficient implementation on P2P architecture. In principal, the design of the retrieval model should be logically independent of the infrastructure it is implemented in. However, we believe that in practice infrastructure constraints cannot be ignored.
References
A. Loser, W. Nejdl, M. Wolpers, and W. Siberski: Information integration in schemabased peer-to-peer networks. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference On Advanced
___________________________________________________________________________ 10 VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
Information Systems Engineering (CAISE 03) (Klagenfurt/Velden, Austria, June 2003). A. Rowstron and P. Druschel. Pastry: Scalable, distributed object location and routing for large-scale peer-to-peer systems. In IFIP/ACM International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms (Middleware), November 2001. C. Tang, S. Dwarkadas: Hybrid Global-Local Indexing for Ecient Peerto-Peer Information Retrieval. First Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI04), San Francisco, March 2004. C. Tang, Z. Xu, S. Dwarkadas: Peer-to-Peer Information Retrieval Using SelfOrganizing Semantic Overlay Networks. SIGCOMM 2003 F. Dabek, B. Zhao, P. Druschel, and I. Stoica: Towards a common API for structured Peer-to-Peer overlays. In 2nd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS02), Feb. 2003. F. Klemm, A. Datta, K. Aberer: A Query-Adaptive Partial Distributed Hash Table for Peer-to-Peer Systems. International Workshop on Peerto-Peer Computing & DataBases (P2P&DB 2004), Crete, Greece, March 2004 I. Stoica, R. Morris, D. Karger, M. F. Kaashoek, and H. Balakrishnan. Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 2001. J. Lu, and J. Callan: Content-based retrieval in hybrid peer-to-peer net-works. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM03). New Orleans, 2003 K. Aberer. P-Grid: A Self-Organizing Access Structure for P2P Information Systems. Sixth Inter-national Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS 2001), Trento, Italy 2001. S. El-Ansary, L. O. Alima, P. Brand, S. Haridi: Ecient Broadcast in Structured P2P Networks. 2nd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS 03), Berkeley, CA, USA, 2003 S. Ratnasamy, P. Francis, M. Handley, R. Karp, and S. Shenker. A scalable contentaddressable network. In SIGCOMM, Aug. 2001.
www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/paper/ http://web.njit.edu/~turoff/Papers/webnettalk/webnettalk.htm
___________________________________________________________________________ 11 VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN
MGMT630 – Knowledge Management
www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/Papers
___________________________________________________________________________ 12 VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY OF PAKISTAN
doc_659948010.doc