Design of partnership-centred information repository
Loading...
Date
2007
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Organizations require the development of Information Repository to improve their products and services. With the rising interest in the semantic web, research efforts have been geared towards the integration of distributed information sources into an interoperable knowledge-base environment. The objective of this research was to design an information repository to facilitate the integration of operational data from various sources into a single and consistent knowledge base that supports analysis and decision making within and across different organizations.
The research activities that resulted in the proposed information repository consisted of two major steps: (i) the design of an information repository aimed at promoting the usage of e-commerce through the Internet amongst the Small Medium Enterprises and the larger organizations and (ii) the implementation of repository architecture to facilitate knowledge sharing in response to queries on distributed metadata and easily interoperable sources merged into one semantic entity.
The SMEs and the larger organizations are focused as partners in the design of this information repository. The implication of focusing on the SMEs and the larger organizations is in line with the South African Government efforts to promote Black businesses, because the former is considered to be one of the most viable sectors with economic potential growth.
The functionality of the information repository is partitioned into a set of services which include: (i) registration of SMEs' profile, (ii) service advertisement and (Hi) service delivery. These services provided the mechanism for storing, retrieving and updating of information. Richards Bay Minerals, an organization in the mining industry that has outsourced part of her core business to junior partner was used as a case study to illustrate the model.
XML, the Extensible Mark-up Language provided the descriptive language for the exchange of information between the different organizations via the web. The Java programming language was adopted for implementation. A performance evaluation of the information repository based on a set of parameters like usability, scalability, functionality and collaboration was carried out, with the aim of determining areas where improvements could be made in providing solution to the design of information repository for the web environment.
Description
Submitted to the Faculty of Science and Agriculture in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Science in Computer Science Department of Computer Science University of Zululand, 2007.
Keywords
Information repository, Java programming language, Knowledge sharing ontology, Information representation