International Journal of Virtual Communities and Social Networking, 4(2), 1-17, April-June 2012 1
Enabling Virtual Knowledge Networks for Human Rights Monitoring for People with Disabilities Christo El Morr, York University, Canada Mihaela Dinca-Panaitescu, United Way Toronto, Canada Marcia Rioux, York University, Canada Julien Subercaze, Telecom Saint-Etienne, France Pierre Maret, Laboratoire Hubert Curien, Université de Saint-Etienne, France Natalia Bogdan, York University, Canada
ABSTRACT Holistic disability rights monitoring is an imperative approach to permit translation of rights on paper into rights in reality for people with disabilities. However, evidence-based knowledge produced through such a holistic monitoring approach has to be accessible to a broad range of stakeholders, e.g., groups such as: researchers, representatives of disability community, people with disabilities, media, policy makers, and the general public. Besides, the collected evidence should contribute to building capacity within disability community around human rights questions. This article explains the design process of a Virtual Knowledge Network (VKN) as an operational tool to support mobilization and dissemination of evidence-based knowledge produced by the Disability Rights Promotion International Canada (DRPI-Canada) project. This VKN is embedded in the more general framework of DRPI, grounded in a human rights approach to disability that acknowledges the importance of creating knowledgeable communities in order to make the disability rights monitoring efforts sustainable. Keywords:
Disability Rights, Disability Rights Monitoring, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Networks, Virtual Communities
1. INTRODUCTION Disability activists and scholars refer to disability rights as “…the equal effective enjoyment DOI: 10.4018/jvcsn.2012040101
of all human rights by people with disabilities” (Disability Rights Promotion International (DRPI), 2003). The majority consensus is that “disability” is a consequence of negative social conditions rather than an individual’s specific medical impairment (Barnes, Mercer,
Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
2 International Journal of Virtual Communities and Social Networking, 4(2), 1-17, April-June 2012
& Shakespeare, 1999; Fougeyrollas, Cloutier, Bergeron, Côté, & Michel, 1999; Rioux, 1997, 2001; Shakespeare, 1999; Thomas, 2002). Monitoring or auditing is central to an effective and organized strategy to enforcing the enjoyment of human rights by all people with disabilities on equal basis. Rights monitoring is a research method that involves the tracking, collection, collation, analysis, interpretation and mobilization of data and knowledge about the life situation of people using human rights standards as benchmarks. A review of international human rights literature shows that, unlike areas such as women’s rights (Callamard, 1999a, 1999b), disability rights monitoring is relatively underdeveloped (International Disability Rights Monitor, 2004). To date, comprehensive knowledge about the human rights situation of people with disabilities in Canada has not been systematically collected, documented, stored and analyzed. A holistic approach to monitoring is needed to integrate multiple levels of analysis (i.e., individual, system levels) and produce accurate knowledge on the multi-faceted situation of people with disabilities facing human rights violations. Mobilization and dissemination of evidence-based knowledge produced through monitoring processes represent the keystone of the holistic approach to monitoring. Integrating different aspects of monitoring requires fluent collaboration and communication among a broad range of individuals, organizations and policy makers. Furthermore, knowledge produced by the project should be made accessible to people with disabilities and their organizations to build their capacity on disability rights monitoring beyond the life of the project. This paper proposes an operational tool that enables dynamic collaboration among project’s participants and knowledge creation and sharing across the four themes of the project and with larger communities to support them in their efforts to improve the life of Canadians with disabilities.
2. BACKGROUND 2.1 Conceptual Framing of Disability Discourse on disability has been dominated by the perception of disability as an “individual pathology” or a biomedical condition. Being seen as a deviation from a biomedical norm and the result of either a mental or physical condition, as a consequence, disability is assumed to be prevented or ameliorated by situating the individual closer to the established norm through medical, biological, or genetic intervention (Rioux, 1997). Even the broader social approach that places disability at the intersection between individual and environment cannot move beyond the mindset of accommodation in which environments should be arranged to accommodate people’s differences. It has to move beyond a call for environmental adaptations to address social and economic conditions that disadvantage people with disabilities. Individual investigations have uncovered systemic human rights violations against people with disabilities such as significant levels of low literacy (Calamai, 1987; Minister of Industry Canada and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2005; Rioux, Zubrow, Miller, & Bunch, 2003), denial of medical care (Frazee, Gilmour, & Mykitiuk, 2005), high levels of poverty (Fawcett, 1996; Torjman, 1996), disproportionately high unemployment rates (Abberley, 2002; Canadian Council on Social Development, 2005; Human Resources Development Canada, 2002; Roeher Institute, 2004), lack of access to income programs and education (Armstrong & Barton, 1999), marginalization and exclusion of disability issues and people with disabilities in civil society organizations (Charlton, 1998; Rioux et al., 2003), and inability to access transportation (Fougeyrollas, Tremblay, Noreau, Dumont,
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Enabling virtual knowledge Networks for human rights monitoring for people with disabilities Christo El Morr*1, Mihaela Dinca-Panaitescu2, Marcia Rioux3, Julien Subercaze4, Pierre Maret5, Natalia Bogdan6 1
York University, School of Health Policy and Management, 4700 Keele St., HNE bldg. 4th floor, Toronto ON, M3J 1P3, Canada; Email:
[email protected], Phone: +1 416 736 3100 ext. 22115, Fax:+1 416 736 5227 2
150 Baywood Crt.; Thornhill, ON, Canada, Email:
[email protected]; Phone: 01140-905-882-1694
3
York University, School of Health Policy and Management, 4700 Keele St., HNE bldg. 4 th floor, Toronto ON, M3J 1P3, Canada; Email:
[email protected], Phone: +1 416 736 2100 ext. 22112, Fax:+1 416 736 5227 4
Telecom Saint-Etienne, 42 rue docteur Rémy Annino, 42000 Saint-Etienne, France ; Email:
[email protected] , Phone: +33 477 915 864, Fax:+33 477 915 899 5
Université de Saint-Etienne, Laboratoire Hubert Curien, CNRS, UMR5516, Bât. F - 18 Rue du Professeur Benoît Lauras, 42000 Saint-Etienne, France ; Email:
[email protected], Phone: +33 477 915 780 Fax:+ +33 477 915 781 6
York University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, 4700 Keele St., Toronto ON, M3J 1P3, Canada; Email:
[email protected], Phone: +1 416 736 2100 ext. 33113, Fax:+1 416 736 5872
Abstract Holistic disability rights monitoring is an imperative approach to permit translation of rights on paper into rights in reality for people with disabilities. Though, evidence-based knowledge produced through such a holistic monitoring approach has to be accessible to a broad range of stakeholders, e.g. groups – researchers, representatives of disability community, people with disabilities, media, policy makers, and general public. Besides, the collected evidence should contribute to building capacity within disability community around human rights questions. This article explains the design process of a Virtual Knowledge Network (VKN) as an operational tool to support mobilization and dissemination of evidence-based knowledge produced by the Disability Rights Promotion International Canada (DRPICanada) project. This VKN is embedded in the more general framework of DRPI, grounded in a human rights approach to disability that acknowledges the importance of creating knowledgeable communities in order to make the disability rights monitoring efforts sustainable. Keywords: Disability rights, Disability Rights Monitoring, Virtual Communities, Knowledge Networks, Knowledge Management
1
Introduction
Disability activists and scholars refer to disability rights as “…the equal effective enjoyment of all human rights by people with disabilities” (Disability Rights Promotion International (DRPI), 2003). The majority consensus is that “disability” is a consequence of negative social conditions rather than an individual’s specific medical impairment (Barnes, Mercer, & Shakespeare, 1999;
1
Fougeyrollas, Cloutier, Bergeron, Côté, & Michel, 1999; Rioux, 1997, 2001; Shakespeare, 1999; Thomas, 2002). Monitoring or auditing is central to an effective and organized strategy to enforcing the enjoyment of human rights by all people with disabilities on equal basis. Rights monitoring is a research method that involves the tracking, collection, collation, analysis, interpretation and mobilization of data and knowledge about the life situation of people using human rights standards as benchmarks. A review of international human rights literature shows that, unlike areas such as women’s rights (Callamard, 1999a, 1999b), disability rights monitoring is relatively underdeveloped (International Disability Rights Monitor, 2004). To date, comprehensive knowledge about the human rights situation of people with disabilities in Canada has not been systematically collected, documented, stored and analyzed. A holistic approach to monitoring is needed to integrate multiple levels of analysis (i.e. individual, system levels) and produce accurate knowledge on the multi-faceted situation of people with disabilities facing human rights violations. Mobilization and dissemination of evidence-based knowledge produced through monitoring processes represent the keystone of the holistic approach to monitoring. Integrating different aspects of monitoring requires fluent collaboration and communication among a broad range of individuals, organizations and policy makers. Furthermore, knowledge produced by the project should be made accessible to people with disabilities and their organizations to build their capacity on disability rights monitoring beyond the life of the project. This paper proposes an operational tool that enables dynamic collaboration among project’s participants and knowledge creation and sharing across the four themes of the project and with larger communities to support them in their efforts to improve the life of Canadians with disabilities. 2 2.1
Background Conceptual Framing of Disability
Discourse on disability has been dominated by the perception of disability as an “individual pathology” or a biomedical condition. Being seen as a deviation from a biomedical norm and the result of either a mental or physical condition, as a consequence, disability is assumed to be prevented or ameliorated by situating the individual closer to the established norm through medical, biological, or genetic intervention (Rioux, 1997). Even the broader social approach that places disability at the intersection between individual and environment cannot move beyond the mindset of accommodation in which environments should be arranged to accommodate people’s differences. It has to move beyond a call for environmental adaptations to address social and economic conditions that disadvantage people with disabilities. Individual investigations have uncovered systemic human rights violations against people with disabilities such as significant levels of low literacy (Calamai, 1987; Minister of Industry Canada and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2005; Rioux, Zubrow, Miller, & Bunch, 2003), denial of medical care (Frazee, Gilmour, & Mykitiuk, 2005), high levels 2
of poverty (Fawcett, 1996; Torjman, 1996), disproportionately high unemployment rates (Abberley, 2002; Canadian Council on Social Development, 2005; Human Resources Development Canada, 2002; Roeher Institute, 2004), lack of access to income programs and education (Armstrong & Barton, 1999), marginalization and exclusion of disability issues and people with disabilities in civil society organizations(Charlton, 1998; Rioux et al., 2003), and inability to access transportation (Fougeyrollas, Tremblay, Noreau, Dumont, & St-Onge, 2005; Robert, Morin, & Dorvil, 2002). In many cases, these factors are interpreted as issues of service provision rather than being recognized as fundamental rights in order to achieve a society in which people with disabilities are free to fully and equally participate. This requires a conceptualization of disability within a human rights framework that looks at how society marginalizes people, and what strategies are needed to address existing inequalities. It involves moving away from viewing people with disabilities as anomalies towards viewing them as rights holders and equal citizens (Quinn & Degener, 2002). This approach to disability is central to the framework employed by DRPI-Canada project in its efforts to develop comprehensive tools that help in translating rights on paper into rights in reality (Figure 1.).
Holistic disability rights monitoring
Sustainability of disability rights monitoring
Human Rights Approach to Disability
Evidence-based knowledge mobilization
Knowledgeable communities and Capacity building
Figure 1. DRPI-Canada general framework
3
2.2
Holistic Disability Rights Monitoring –Essential approach to produce evidence-based knowledge on the exercise of rights by people with disabilities
Rights monitoring is the first step in making this shift possible. The recent enactment of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has increased the recognition that the participation of people with disabilities can no longer continue to be a matter of rhetoric. However, the Convention requires that countries establish monitoring systems and mechanisms. Governments, civil society and international organizations are now focusing on various methods to monitor the human rights situation of people with disabilities. While there are a number of international and Canadian human rights commitments and rights monitoring initiatives in the international arena(Disability Rights Promotion International (DRPI), 2003; International Disability Rights Monitor (IDRM), 2004), Canada lacks comprehensive and multi-level analysis of disability rights violations. In light of this emerging context, DRPI-Canada project takes a significant step forward in developing a holistic system to monitor the human rights situation of people with disabilities that integrates four interrelated themes: Monitoring Individual Experiences (gathering information about the actual human rights situation of people with disabilities), Monitoring Media (examining the coverage and depiction of people with disabilities in the media), Monitoring Law and Policy (assessing the effectiveness of laws, policies, and case law in protecting and promoting disability rights) and Monitoring Survey Datasets (examining the information collected by Canadian national surveys on the situation of people with disabilities from a human rights perspective). 2.3
Mobilization and Dissemination of Evidence-Based Knowledge – Essential process to the sustainability of disability rights monitoring
Holistic disability rights monitoring is grounded in on-going communication and sharing of resources, training and methodological approaches among the four themes. Furthermore, in order to make disability rights monitoring sustainable beyond the life of the project, it is essential to build capacity, leadership and knowledge development within the disability community in order to promote greater awareness of disability discrimination and to enable people with disabilities themselves to take ownership of disability rights monitoring. In this context, a complex system is required to facilitate the collaboration of a full range of project participants – researchers, representatives of disability community, policy makers, and general public – and support capacity building within disability community through access to online tools and training resources. 3
Methods
This paper describes the design and development process of a Virtual Knowledge Network (VKN) to support the holistic disability rights monitoring.
4
3.1
Virtual Communities
The Internet, incepted in the late 1980s, provided a formidable infrastructure for the creation online or virtual communities (VCs), similar to those we find in the off-line communities. VCs received a considerable level of attention from the research community in different disciplines : Computer Science, Sociology, Psychology and other disciplines (Preece, 2000). A virtual community is a form of social system; even though it functions online, it inherits some of the social system’s characteristics (Weissman, 2000) such as causal reciprocity, purpose, design, roles, circumstances, officers, passion, needs, loyalty, and access. Causal reciprocity means that a VC is about a mutual “give and take” that organizes the common interest of VC members. The purpose of a VC is the main aim behind its formation, e.g. share knowledge, exchange experiences, work together, etc. In a VC, members usually assume different roles; some are consumers of information, others are producers, administrators, lurkers, etc. The purpose of a VC is molded by culturally specific circumstances. Moreover, a VC is formed based on the needs of its members, whose loyalty is essential for its success. Many communities are driven by the passion, of its members to share a belief, to generate and communicate knowledge, and so on. Finally, access is an important way to provide the tools to enable members to connect to each other. There are both different perspectives and different classifications of VCs (El Morr, 2007; El Morr & Kawash, 2007; Stein, Hawking, & Sharma, 2005); though, VCs can be constructed to form a knowledge network (KN). While investigating formal knowledge networks (Clark, 1998), Clark defined “networks” as “a combination of persons, usually dispersed over a number of geographically separate sites, with appropriate communication technologies”. One kind of “networks” is knowledge networks where participants capture, access, use, create, and define knowledge (Merali & Davies, 2001). Using virtual knowledge communities have been a subject of interest in research (Davies, Duke, & Sure, 2003; Maret, Hammoud, & Calmet, 2004). Our purpose is to design and implement a VC for Knowledge Mobilization, i.e. for knowledge generation and dissemination, in the context of monitoring human rights for people with disabilities in Canada. Jansen et al. propose four categories of knowledge networks based on the degree of complexity and the degree of variability i.e. the unpredictability of its environment (Jansen, Steenbakkers, & Jägers, 2000): those with (1) low complexity and low variability, or (2) low complexity and high variability, or (3) high complexity and low variability, or (4) high complexity and high variability. Based on the nature of our project, different categories will exist in our VC-KM platform since different categories of Virtual Communities can be created for different purposes. We can identify actually five different VCs: four VCs related to the research themes mentioned above (individual monitoring, media monitoring, policy monitoring, and survey dataset monitoring), with the purpose of collaboration and closed to research partners; and one VC for the public with the purpose of disseminating knowledge in the public sphere. We can also predict that other VCs can be built in the future with different purposes and members (e.g. people with disabilities, community organizations). Our VC-KM platform is a hybrid model that supports Jansen et al. four categories. In all teams the researchers and community members manage highly complex activities with high variability, while we anticipate that knowledge dissemination communities (dissemination of fact sheets, policy briefs, etc.) - which are open to the public or to private partners - will have a low complexity and low variability. On the other hand, we anticipate that some communities will be based on an e-learning model and therefore will have a high complexity and low variability. 5
While several virtual communities platform exist, neither general purpose ones such as dolphin (www.boonex.com, 2008), nor educational oriented once such as WebCT and Blackboard who recently merged (www.blackboard.com), and Moodle (moodle.com, 2008); are adapted to our research team objectives in terms of creating dynamic relations among team members, enabling particularly each member (and not only administrators) to create folders and upload/download documents, to co-edit documents and to share files across communities in different levels of granularity: share with one person, one group of people and a whole community. Besides, none of these sites is fully accessible to people with visual disabilities, while accessibility is an essential objective that we strive for in our project. The design of our VKN hybrid model platform is described in detail in the next sections of the paper. 3.2
Platform Design and Implementation
3.2.1 Community Requirements In early stages of the project interviews were made with researchers and administrators of the project to detect the requirements of the platform. The requirements were collected using the Unified Modeling Language (UML). We’ve identified that for the VC to be successful it should incorporate the following high level characteristics: 1. Facilitate cross-theme knowledge creation and sharing even among members of different communities. Consequently, enable intra and inter community knowledge creation and sharing members (file editing and sharing) 2. Enable dynamic members’ collaboration across communities; thus, any participant should be able to create folders and upload files, to become member of several communities, and organize folders and files 3. Facilitate external partners participation (e.g. government decision-makers and community organizations) by developing an open system 4. Provide an e-learning (education and training) component to build rights monitoring capacity within the disability community 5. Enable the dissemination of knowledge to the public In summary, the high level characteristic is to enable the creation of a collaborative open system platform that allows the creation of VCs for a variety of members (e.g. researchers, community organizations, public), for different Knowledge-related purposes such as knowledge creation (document sharing and co-editing) and knowledge dissemination (information communication, education, and training), allowing dynamic collaboration among members (control of folder/files, dynamic membership, dynamic sharing of files: share with one person, one group of people and a whole community). Taking into consideration the above guidelines and characteristics and the importance of incorporating the knowledge of people with disabilities themselves a model of the VC has been designed.
6
3.2.2 Community Design In the field of disability, tools and training resources for evidence-based data collection are very limited, as are tools and methods for multiple levels of analysis (i.e. individual, systemic) and particularly those tailored to the Canadian context. Development and dissemination of these tools in the context of the virtual knowledge community, is paramount, and it is important that they incorporate an e-learning components in order to support continuous training to develop monitoring skills (online manuals, course guides, books, tools…). Besides, these dissemination tools (fact sheets, research reports, analysis and recommendations) need to be directed to multiple groups (i.e. researchers, community organizations and individuals, the media, policy makers). Internally, a VKN should support team members’ communication to enable researchers to communicate their findings, and collaborate around topics of interest. In addition it should enable partners to exchange findings, experiences and strategies regarding disability rights. Therefore, members will need a component allowing collaboration to facilitate knowledge creation. Finally, the VKN needs to facilitate the search for information; therefore, the presence of alert/notification system that triggers members’ attention to specific information of interest to them is important. Besides, the VKN should allow monitoring to what extent knowledge is disseminated: how many people are accessing the VKN, the number of hits, which documents are being downloaded the most, what is the profile of people interested in download/uploading a specific topic, what is the feedback of users, etc.). Consequently the VKN was designed into four components allowing (1) knowledge creation, (2) knowledge discovery, (3) knowledge dissemination and (4) VKN management. The VKN platform was designed to comprise functionalities that support all four components.
Figure 2. A high level view of the components of the collaborative platform
Figure 3 presents the platform architecture in two parts, one part represents the virtual community architecture in a three tier architecture model, and the other part represents the
7
knowledge management dissemination.
component
comprising
knowledge
creation,
discovery
and
Figure 3. The VKN infrastructure model
3.2.3 Community Platform Implementation We’ve adopted open source material throughout the project. The virtual community component has been implemented using Java Servlets and Java Server Pages (jsp) and JavaBeans technologies; in a later phase we’ve added some functionalities using Java server Faces. Security of information is guaranteed through the implementation of the SSL protocol provided by Apache and Tomcat servers. We’ve tested many database management systems and finally opted for JavaDB being used by one of our partners. Users of the system have been consulted both in the development and implementation as a way of testing the efficacy of the system. The VC platform permits two major roles: Administrator and Member. Members can play two roles: consumers and producers of information. The difference between members and administrators is that the latter are given the power to create/drop communities and to allow members to join a particular community. Five communities have been created; four of which deal with the four research themes of and one is public (currently dormant). We are suggesting that members of the public community can play the role of information consumer (i.e. they seek and access information); occasionally they may produce information via email or bulletin board. The administrator can create new communities or drop/delete them (figure 4). A“pending request” functionality allows the administrator to check members’ requests (figure 5) and take the proper action.
Figure 4. Creating a new community
8
Figure 5. The screen that allows the administrator to grant a person membership to a community
Administrators and members of the themes communities can upload and assign each file a “visibility” right (figure 6); that is a member can decide if his/her file is visible by a whole community or a specific person in that community, or any combination of these two possibilities. Members can download files and use an email and bulletin board to communicate with each other. A member can request membership to one of the existing communities.
Figure 6. A member assigning “visibility” right (i.e. access rights) to other specific members and/or while communities.
3.2.4 Usability and accessibility To ensure the usability of the portal, we took into account relevant guidelines (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2008) and decided to use a light XHTML W3C compliant template for the layout, with few pictures, to reduce users waiting time and enhance accessibility. The layout is light and easy to scan by the users, a menu on the left gives access to all the features of the portal in one click. The navigation was designed to minimize users’ interaction to access information. Content organization was designed to be clear and logically organized. Items are grouped by topics, for example community related features are grouped together as well as the community member management features. To avoid accessibility issues, we use a layout with few pictures. Thus, most of the content being readable text, accessibility features were implemented easily. We followed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (World Wide Web Consortium, 2008) from the W3C; thus, for 9
example, we made menu items accessible using keyboard shortcuts. We have also followed Canada’s Common Look and Feel Standards (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2008); consequently, non-XTHML documents are proposed in multiple formats and a link to required software to access those documents is included on the page; this specific requirement ensures an easy access to non-XHTML documents. Within the portal, most of the documents uploaded by the community members are text documents in Word or PDF format; therefore this latest requirement is judicious. 3.2.5 Knowledge Management 3.2.5.1
Background
Knowledge management (KM), even if not considered in the exact terms as we understand it nowadays had always be a central question in human societies. Consequently, its roots are to be found in the early history of human societies. In the 20th century, efforts due to rationalization of work, management as well as cognitive sciences and psychology led to the current usage of KM(Wiig, 2000). The situation of KM started in the 1980s with the wide use of information technologies in companies and the focus on the intangible asset that knowledge represents. The word KM itself appeared in the 80s and the academic discipline was created in 1995(Stankosky, 2005). As a transversal discipline, KM regroups concepts from Information Technology Management, Philosophy, Cognitive Sciences, and Organization Studies. The result is the existence of several schools and approaches in the practice of KM. If there is no miracle method to assess or enable Knowledge Management, several processes and guidelines have been setup. KM Frameworks proposed guidelines to KM solution managers. First we have to distinguish the two kinds of KM Frameworks, a high level descriptive one and an implementation oriented one. The latter one focuses on the “how to” implement KM in an organization whereas the first one investigates the question of “what is KM” (Wong & Aspinwall, 2004). In our case, implementation frameworks are the most related to our task. Concerning implementation frameworks, Sunassee and Sewry (Sunassee & Sewry, 2002) defined three categories of frameworks: prescriptive, descriptive and hybrids. Prescriptive approaches give direction concerning the procedures that should be used, without describing precisely their content or implementations, step approach frameworks are mainly prescriptive frameworks(Wong & Aspinwall, 2004). Descriptive frameworks provide the key factors of KM that can drive the initiative to success or originate its failure, their forms of representations are mostly graphical(Wong & Aspinwall, 2004), examples of descriptive frameworks can be found in (Holsapple & Joshi, 2002) and (Gore & Gore, 1999). Finally hybrid approaches combine both prescriptive and descriptive methods. Nowadays, there are 2 main KM trends: People centered and Information Management and Information Technology Centered KM. Using previous experiences (Davenport, 1998), we used several relevant guidelines to develop our approach in this healthcare related platform. As our initiative focuses more on the technical purpose than on a human approach, guidelines regarding technical support were taken in account. Davenport (1998) notices the importance of the organizational structure as a key factor for success of a platform. Flexible knowledge structure and good usability also contribute to the success of the initiative. During the development of our platform, those basic guidelines were taken in account, from early specification to late implementation.
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3.2.5.2
Knowledge Management on the Platform
Within the platform, numerous users, i.e. producers, will share large amount of documents within and between the communities for consumers. A large number of users and documents lead to the creation of the knowledge that needs to be managed. Therefore a Knowledge Management capacity was developed in the VC. During preliminary tests, we identified two major issues and defined features to address them. First, searching through a large number of documents stored in heterogeneous formats (e.g. xls, doc, PDF) will make the information access difficult to the users. Therefore, finding relevant documents in the platform regarding to the users interest is identified as of utmost importance, recognizing that the technology sophistication of users will be very broad. Second, as the information producers are mainly researchers, this platform offers a great opportunity to create cross-theme synergies, open new collaborations or enforce the existing ones. Besides, the platform is designed for the public, and other researchers and organizations at a later stage. The large number of potential contributors will make the discovery of potential common interests between members difficult. Consequently, it is important to facilitate this discovery process. To address these two issues, we designed a matching feature combined with a push mechanism. This will enable the system to describe users and documents using metadata in order to (1) notify the user when relevant information has been added to the platform and (2) match users having a “similar” profile. We identified four sequential steps in the process: Information gathering, information extraction, matching, and push mechanism. Step 1: Information Gathering The aim of the first step is to gather all the information concerning each member. This includes, research interests, publications, navigation history and geographical information. User will enter keywords describing their interest, choose their topics of interest in a list and upload their publication. Navigation history is stored in the platform. Step 2: Information Extraction Metadata of documents are the key for relevant matching, although document formats like .xls, .pdf or .doc provide some metadata, their relevance is low. The aim of this step is to complete both metadada of documents and the users’ profile. Degemmis et al. (M. Degemmis, Lops, & Semeraro, 2006) tackled the problem of the completion of the user profile by machine learning techniques to induce semantic users’ profiles. We use text-mining libraries, RapidMiner (rapid-i.com, 2008), to extract keywords from text documents. These keywords will complete the documents metadata. These extraction will take place for both documents uploaded by users and the publication they entered to complete their profile. Navigation will also be mined to extract relevant topic of interest (Widyantoro, Loerger, & Yen, 2001; Xiaobin, Jay Budzik, & Kristian, 2000). Text extraction for MS Office formats is done by POI1 and from pdf using PDFBox2. Quality of text extraction is very satisfying. We trained the RapidMiner model with more than 50 documents related to healthcare. Using this healthcare dedicated text-mining model gives impressive results for keyword extraction. Once the keywords automatically extracted, the owner of the file can decide to manually edit, add or remove keywords from this list (figure 7).
1
http://poi.apache.org/
2
http://www.pdfbox.org/
11
Figure 7: Keyword editing after extraction
Step 3: Matching Algorithms We identified two types of matching, user/documents and users/users. Both matching algorithms follow the same principle of computing a distance between the gathered metadata. Yu et al. (Yu, Al-Jadir, & Spaccapietra, 2005)presented an algorithm for matching demands and supplies of profiles using a description logic based approach, a similar approach can be used for the user/documents matching. Degemmis et al. (Marco Degemmis, Lops, & Giovanni, 2006) proposes two matchmakers algorithm, one over free text and a logic based one. A semantic approach was also used for the matching of user profiles and location-based services (Cali, Calvanese, Colucci, Di Noia, & Donini, 2004) Step 4: Push mechanism Users can create alert using keywords, or automatic alerts where the system will use their whole profile description. Alert using keywords will notice the users about the upload of documents containing these keywords and the automatic alert system will use the profile that was extracted from the user publication, navigation history… We show in figure 6 the activity diagram for the document upload alerting mechanism. The platform also displays latest relevant documents on users’ pages and also provides a RSS Feed for each user.
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Figure 8. Activity diagram for the document upload alerting mechanism
Multiplying channels of exchanges enhance the global performance of knowledge dissemination; therefore users have the possibility to exchange on the forum and to exchange private messages using a mailbox system. Those communication medium are complementary to the main file repository combined with the alert mechanism and RSS push system. Users interaction is then enhanced, discussion on a paper uploaded in the repository can start and lead to a better understanding or constructive critics. 3.2.5.3
Knowledge Creation and Dissemination
A law and policy monitoring tool has been developed; it involves the collection of legislation, policy and program data specific to disability rights in. A template is designed to gather data addressing all categories of rights (civil, cultural, economic, political and social). The template serves as an assessment tool, allowing the identification of gaps in legislation and policy and includes cross-references to the relevant provisions of key international human rights treaties. This team investigates the policies and laws that are related to disability, on the provincial and federal levels. Researchers in this team are interested in looking into analyzing to which extent the Canadian laws and policies follow the International conventions related to disabilities. This is done through a survey that is designed to look into each article in an international convention that is related to disability and to see if there are policies and laws and case laws in the provinces and the federation that accommodate that article or that on the contrary hinder its application or simply do not acknowledge it. The tool is built around a database designed to gather information from these four different teams and to enable searching for data collected from the different teams. The tool has been used to enter data and is used to search for information and is accessible online.
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Figure 9. Part of a form to enter Law and Policy monitoring data 4
Conclusion
We have created a sustainable disability rights virtual knowledge network to (1) support its research findings, and (2) continue to mobilize community members, academics, students, as well as the media and policy makers around disability rights and (3) to empower the users in the development and use of the network. Members are provided tools to publish (upload) and read (download) information (articles, fact sheets, policy briefs, etc.); to communicate to each other in synchronous (chat) as well as in an asynchronous way (email, bulletin board). We designed a system to encourage members’ participation to receive continuous desktop notification (push) on issues of interest happening in the community (a new document uploaded, a new meeting is scheduled, etc.) as well as a “What’s New” (pull) functionality that a member can use feature when someone is logged in. The law and policy monitoring data is stored and a search tool is provided to tap into the data; work is underway to provide and more advanced data presentation capacity. Other advanced features of the system also identified as desirable in the VC include allowing members to co-edit a document, to participate in a managed formal-like virtual meeting (turn taking), set up online questionnaires. Some other features were identified as enjoyable such as using icons instead of text-only for files and folders present in the community. Finally, work is underway to ensure all parts of the system are accessible for people with disabilities (Alison & David, 2006; Boldyreff, 2002). One of the problems this work has faced is the fluidity of requirements; research teams did have to change information system requirements as the project progressed, this resulted with a unusual development cycle where developers had to revise requirement and adapt accordingly. The final result reached demanded much more time than expected. Besides, some features in the requirements where not as important as it has been expected, for example participants have disregarded the email features and preferred to continue using their own emails and not add another login-password to their environment. The feature that was found to be essential was the knowledge creation and dissemination that aggregates data from all four research teams, Monitoring Individual Experiences, Monitoring Media, Monitoring Law and Policy and Monitoring Survey Datasets. Currently the data gathered from the Law and Policy monitoring team has been collected and stored, and a search engine allows researchers to aggregate the findings. The next step is to design integrative strategy to connect the current data
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and integrate them with the other three monitoring teams’ findings. An online analytical and processing (OLAP) functionality is then to be designed and integrated into the VKN. Finally, to evaluate the utility and effectiveness of the project, we need to design a monitoring component in order to monitor the knowledge dissemination on the platform. Monitoring would include documents transfer, ease of access to information and users activities. Besides, testing the usability of the website especially for people with disability is to be made. We believe that this virtual knowledge network will make a significant impact on the training and development of students and individuals affiliated with disability community organizations, by providing the academic and disability community with evidence-based knowledge and new online tools for on-going disability rights monitoring. 5
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the SSHRC (CURA, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) for funding this research project as part of a larger initiative on Disability Rights Monitoring. 6
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