PhD Dissertation Proposal by Vincent MACK Zhi Wei | Crowdsourcing Knowledge Creation: A Knowledge Graph Perspective

In recent years, crowd-sourcing has been gradually adopted for knowledge creation. Knowledge creation is the process where new knowledge is created from existing knowledge resources through practice, collaboration, and reflection.  In order to understand how knowledge transfers, recombination, and integration influence knowledge creation outcomes, it is necessary for researchers to be able to be able to transform knowledge into data for analysis. Yet, effective knowledge representation, particularly of tacit knowledge, remains a key debate in the field of knowledge management. This issue could be addressed through the use of knowledge graphs, whose properties allow for rich representation of knowledge content and structures. Knowledge Graphs have been adopted by firms for all manner of tasks such as database management, information retrieval, content recommendation, supply-chain management and knowledge discovery. However, two key issues need to be addressed: (i) methods to generate knowledge graphs are heterogeneous and vary based on knowledge domains; and (ii) understanding of how knowledge content and network structure influences knowledge creation outcomes remain vague as network research on knowledge creation processes mostly focus on social networks instead of knowledge networks. To this effort, we first propose a meta-approach for generating knowledge graphs from unstructured text based on Roger Schank’s Conceptual Dependency Theory, an interlingual theory of conceptualisation. Second, we study how the structural and semantic properties of knowledge networks factor in the perception of idea quality. In addition, we propose further research to address how knowledge transfers between ideators and collaborators influence knowledge creation outcomes.

Vincent Mack is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University, supervised by Professor Tang Qian. Vincent’s research interests lies in Knowledge Management, Knowledge Representation, and Network Analysis. His current work is in studying crowd-sourcing knowledge creation on online communities.