Special Track on Knowledge IT Artifacts (KITA) in professional communities and aggregations (KITA 2020)

Aim and 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], like Health-Care, Products/Processes/Services Manufacturing, Education, and so on. 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. Examples of KAs that could be observed and discussed at the KITA special track 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 systems. 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 Special Track.

In the hope of the organizers, this track 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

Knowledge Artifacts Design and evaluation
Metadata representations of Knowledge Artifacts
Metadata and Knowledge Artifacts in Health-Care
Metadata and Knowledge Artifacts in Education
Big-data and Knowledge Artifacts
Digital fabrication
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
Human-Data Interaction

Submission procedure

The following types of submissions are invited:

Full papers (12 pages, CCIS format) reporting completed research
Short papers (6 pages, CCIS format) presenting ongoing or preliminary research
Presentations and Posters (3-4 pages)
Proposals for Tutorials, Workshops. Demos and Panels (1-3 pages providing a description)

Submissions should be original and not previously submitted, published and under review to other Conferences or Journals. All submissions will be reviewed on the basis of relevance, originality, importance and clarity following a double-blind peer review process. Submitted papers have to follow the LNCS proceedings formatting style and guidelines (https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines). Authors of accepted submissions will be asked to register to the Conference and present their work in the form of either oral presentation or poster presentation.

Interested authors can submit to EasyChair.

Conference Proceedings

Proceedings will be published by Springer in CCIS (Communications in Computer and Information Science) book series (https://www.springer.com/series/7899). CCIS is abstracted/indexed in Scopus, SCImago, EI-Compendex, Mathematical Reviews, DBLP, Google Scholar. CCIS volumes are also submitted for the inclusion in ISI Proceedings.

Other Publication Opportunities

Selected papers might be considered for a revised and extended version to be published in a range of international journals, including the International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies (Inderscience) (https://www.inderscience.com/jhome.php?jcode=ijmso) and Data Technologies and Applications (Emerald) (http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/journals.htm?id=dta), previously published as Program (http://www.emeraldinsight.com/loi/prog).

Awards

There are two types of awards: the Best Paper award and the Best Student Paper award, both sponsored by euroCRIS (http://www.eurocris.org/).

Best Paper award: This award will be presented to the authors of the best full research paper submitted and presented to the conference.
Best Student Paper award: MTSR sponsors a paper competition to recognize excellence in a conference paper contribution whose primary author is a student (normally at a PhD or MRes level). The student is required to present the paper at the MTSR 2020 conference. Submissions are evaluated on their originality, scientific merits, structure, and clarity of composition.

The author of an awarded paper, and co-authors if any, will be entitled to:

Receive a signed and stamped official award certificate by the conference organizers
Promote their achievement on MTSR conference webpage, and MTSR Social Media
Get invited to submit an extended and revised version of the awarded paper for publication in the International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies (Inderscience) (http://www.inderscience.com/jhome.php?jcode=ijmso);
- Each award comes with the price of a free access/registration to next year’s MTSR. Including all conference materials, together with the printed/digital conference proceedings.
- This voucher, in case of many co-authors, is valid only for one author of the awarded paper, and only for the MTSR conference that follows the year after receiving the award.

Special Track Chairs

Fabio Sartori, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

Angela Locoro, Università Carlo Cattaneo - LIUC, Castellanza (VA), Italy

Arlindo Flavio da Conceição, Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), Brazil.

For any other inquiry, contact track chair via fabio.sartori@unimib.it

Program Committee (TBC)

Federico Cabitza, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
Riccardo Melen, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
Aurelio Ravarini, Università Carlo Cattaneo - LIUC, Castellanza, Italy
Carla Simone, University of Siegen, Germany
Flávio Soares Corrêa da Silva, University of São Paulo, Brazil
Cecilia Zanni-Merk, Insa Rouen Normandie, France

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