Journal of Integrated Design and Process Science

In this paper, we propose a modified version of the Context-aware Stemming algorithm, itself based on the well-known Porter stemmer in an effort to maximize the proportion of the meaningful stems and thus, the search effectiveness without compromising the other performance measures. Several stemmers are presented and a synergetic hybrid solution is proposed. Indeed, the Semantically Enriched Context-Aware Stemming algorithm combines features from algorithmic stemmers and dictionary stemmers with respect to conceptual indexing techniques in order to improve retrieval performance; proposing root words much comparable to lemma. Moreover, a new query-document mapping technique is proposed based on a previous work and the experimental results conducted with the WT2G dataset show that our algorithm is noticeably more efficient as compared to Porter and CAS algorithms.

Acquiring case- or situation-dependent knowledge in real-time is one of the core challenges for modern societies. This holds especially for companies handling complex, knowledge-intensive business processes. The information owned by a company is typically scattered over disparate knowledge bases, document management systems, databases, software applications, and files maintained in the company’s intranet. Enterprise search engines promise to provide the right information to the right people in the company at the right time. An inherent problem of enterprise search systems is, however, that they ignore the complex web of application-dependent relationships spanning individual information resources. For most business cases it is not sufficient to obtain just a list of hits referring to single information pieces matching a query. The search engine should also crawl explicit and hidden relationships between information resources to collect coherent knowledge matching a query. This paper suggests a combination of enterprise search technologies and knowledge representation techniques based on ontologies and user feedback processing. This way, search processes are enabled to exploit explicit or tacit relationships among information elements stored in different resource containers to compose a meaningful answer. The prototype system we implemented provides a generic knowledge structure that models knowledge items, information sources and explicit or deduced relationships between them. This knowledge structure offers a homogeneous and coherent search space. It is deeply integrated with advanced information retrieval technologies to render search processes in large disparate knowledge bases and document management systems more effective and increase the quality of search results. The prototype also serves to capture the collective intelligence of knowledge producers and knowledge users in the form of mutable weighted relationships between knowledge items.

To demonstrate the use of the approach and evaluate its innovative capabilities, the prototype system was successfully tested on a large car manufacturer’s after-sales activities including maintenance, service and repair in car workshops.

Social communication impairment is pervasive among children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and participating in the respective community as a full-fledge member requires positive social behaviours. To help these children acquire acceptable social behaviours, social story approach as an eminent social skills intervention technique makes use of engaging and relevant social stories. Though reported effective, not all social stories created are equally effective for all children in addition to a significant amount of human intervention this approach requires and teacher/ caretaker’s difficulties in providing full-individualized attention. This study investigated how digital social stories intervention augmented with differentiated instructions could help overcome these drawbacks while supplementing the social communication needs of the children with ASD. The results of this study were positive and the proposed approach was effective in improving social behaviours of the children with ASD.

This study evaluated the impacts of knowledge management practices on empowering rural youth for socio-economic benefits in Sarawak, Malaysia. An online survey was conducted with 41 rural youth who have participated in a six-month information and communication technology (ICT) training called the Rural ICT-Guided Home-based Technopreneur (RIGHT) program. The data from the survey were analysed using descriptive statistics and Fisher’s exact tests. The key findings include: (1) the respondents possessed basic computer and internet literacy skills; (2) the majority of the respondents reported an improved employment and earning status after they joined the RIGHT program; and (3) about 30% of the respondents provided ICT skills training and up to 88% of them provided ICT-related services to their community members. From the perspective of knowledge management practices, the findings indicate that: (1) ICT training program serves as a gateway for rural youth to empower themselves through knowledge acquisition; (2) the utilization of the newly acquired knowledge can improve the employment prospects of rural youth and facilitate their inclusion into the labour market; and (3) the sharing of knowledge via telecentres can improve the digital literacy skills and ICT-related services in rural communities. The barriers and challenges that affect the implementation of the knowledge management activities were also investigated in this study. The overall findings suggest that knowledge management can be used as a tool to promote the use, adoption and diffusion of ICTs and facilitate the socio-economic growth of rural communities in developing countries, including Malaysia.

Under the background of the economic globalization, customer requirements play an increasingly important role today in almost every industry. Achieving customer satisfaction becomes the key way for a company to win market shares in the intensive global competitions. In this paper, a four phase QFD-oriented product design framework was proposed by integrating Quality Function Deployment (QFD) with 3 different design methodologies (Environment-Based Design, Analytic Hierarchy Process and Axiomatic Design), to systematically guide product design from the planning phase to the detail design phase, and to build the link between design variables in different phases, so that it is known how customer requirements are met during each development phase, and till the end. Customer requirements and product characteristics are clearly linked together. By using the proposed framework, a case study is presented in this paper for design analysis as well as to illustrate how this framework can be applied. In the case study, customer requirements are successfully captured and mapped down to the detail design level.