Towards a Combined Approach to Metadata inCorporate Knowledge Management: A Case Studyof GE Healthcare

摘要

Through interviews with representatives from GEHealthcare, we determined that a central problem of their cur-rent knowledge management system is users' inability to effec-tively retrieve the documents they need in order to carry out theeveryday business activities of the corporation. We propose athree-pronged approach to resolving the problem, from a user-,data-, and system-centred perspective. From the users' per-spective, we conducted user-based usability studies to confirmand identify the key problem. For our data-centred approach, wedeveloped a new Dublin Core-compatible metadata schema thathas the following four key characteristics: compatibility withexisting practices, specificity to the corporation's needs, simpli-city to facilitate easy adoption and flexibility to evolve as thecorporation grows and changes. From a system-centred per-spective, we developed a new search interface for GE Healthcarethat incorporates our proposed metadata schema to improve theeffectiveness of the information search.