Abstract Given that historical maps (HM) are represented by a complex network of symbols, their semantics cannot be easily and directly understood. To extract the embedded knowledge, scholars have developed semantic organization for different types of HM. However, the construction of semantic organization for HM is challenging due to problems of semantic clutter, semantic loss, and semantic ambiguity. To resolve these problems, this paper proposes a semantic organization system which includes classification, representation, and association mechanisms for HM. The intent is to achieve semantic ordering, semantic enhancement, and semantic association. As a means to verify the proposed semantic organization system, this paper develops an HM knowledge question and answer (Q&A) system. Experimental results show that the Q&A system outperformed Baidu (Wenxinyiyan) and GPT‐4o in terms of precision and recall.

This paper explores the dynamics of justification in the wake of a rumor outbreak on social media. Specifically, it examines the extent to which the five types of justification—descriptive argumentation, presumptive argumentation, evidentialism, truth skepticism, and epistemological skepticism—manifested in different voices including pro-rumor, anti-rumor, and doubts before and after fact-checking. Content analysis was employed on 1,911 tweets related to a rumor outbreak. Non-parametric cross-tabulation was used to uncover nuances in information sharing before and after fact-checking. Augmenting the literature which suggests the online community's susceptibility to hoaxes, the paper offers a silver lining: users are responsible enough to correct rumors during the later phase of a rumor lifecycle. This sense of public-spiritedness can be harnessed by knowledge management practitioners and public relations professionals for crowdsourced rumor refutation.

This article uses linguistic analysis to help users discern the authenticity of online reviews. Two related studies were conducted using hotel reviews as the test case for investigation. The first study analyzed 1,800 authentic and fictitious reviews based on the linguistic cues of comprehensibility, specificity, exaggeration, and negligence. The analysis involved classification algorithms followed by feature selection and statistical tests. A filtered set of variables that helped discern review authenticity was identified. The second study incorporated these variables to develop a guideline that aimed to inform humans how to distinguish between authentic and fictitious reviews. The guideline was used as an intervention in an experimental setup that involved 240 participants. The intervention improved human ability to identify fictitious reviews amid authentic ones.

Although knowledge repositories typically seek to capture the knowledge employees acquire from working on their jobs, little consideration has been given to the influence of job characteristics. This study proposes a job knowledge contribution model that details the influence of different job characteristics on the duration, frequency, and diversity of knowledge contribution through their influences on different knowledge characteristics. The model was assessed with a survey of 255 employees working in knowledge-intensive industries. Identifying the knowledge mechanisms explaining the impact of job characteristics has implications for the theoretical development of knowledge contribution and indicates new directions for research.

This article examines review helpfulness as a function of reviewer reputation, review rating, and review depth. In drawing data from the popular review platform A mazon, results indicate that review helpfulness is positively related to reviewer profile and review depth but is negatively related to review rating. Users seem to have a proclivity for reviews contributed by reviewers with a positive track record. They also appreciate reviews with lambasting comments and those with adequate depth. By highlighting its implications for theory and practice, the article concludes with limitations and areas for further research.

Web applications that offer entertainment rarely support knowledge sharing. Conversely, applications that are intended for knowledge sharing rarely offer entertainment. The intent of this paper is therefore to propose the coalescence of knowledge sharing and entertainment in a Web application. The objectives of this paper are twofold: (1) to introduce a prototype called Rendezvous, which serves as a platform for both knowledge sharing and entertainment and (2) to conduct a formative evaluation of Rendezvous by soliciting feedback and its appeal for users' intention to adopt. A two-stage data collection plan was used. First, qualitative feedback was obtained from a group of 38 participants through focus groups. Thereafter, a questionnaire was developed and administered to 124 participants to assess users' intention to adopt. On the whole, the behavioral intention to adopt Rendezvous seems promising. Factors that seemed to influence behavioral intention to adopt included perceived utility, perceived enjoyment, perceived ease of use and social influences.

Guided by literature on “fatigue” from within the domains of clinical and occupational studies, the present article seeks to define the phenomenon termed social network fatigue in the context of one of the popular uses of social networks, namely, to stay socially connected. This is achieved through an identification of the antecedents and effects of experiences that contribute to negative emotions or to a reduction in interest in using social networks with the help of a mixed‐methods study. Five generic antecedents and varying effects of these antecedents on individual user activities have been identified. Fatigue experiences could result from social dynamics or social interactions of the members of the community, content made available on social networks, unwanted changes to the platform that hosts the network, self‐detected immersive tendencies of the users themselves, or a natural maturing of the life cycle of the community to which the user belongs. The intensity of the fatigue experience varies along a continuum ranging from a mild or transient experience to a more severe experience, which may eventually result in the user's decision to quit the environment that causes stress. Thus, users were found to take short rest breaks from the environment, moderate their activities downward, or suspend their social network activities altogether as a result of fatigue experiences.

The authors investigate the interplay between answer quality and answer speed across question types in community question‐answering sites (CQAs). The research questions addressed are the following: (a) How do answer quality and answer speed vary across question types? (b) How do the relationships between answer quality and answer speed vary across question types? (c) How do the best quality answers and the fastest answers differ in terms of answer quality and answer speed across question types? (d) How do trends in answer quality vary over time across question types? From the posting of 3,000 questions in six CQAs, 5,356 answers were harvested and analyzed. There was a significant difference in answer quality and answer speed across question types, and there were generally no significant relationships between answer quality and answer speed. The best quality answers had better overall answer quality than the fastest answers but generally took longer to arrive. In addition, although the trend in answer quality had been mostly random across all question types, the quality of answers appeared to improve gradually when given time. By highlighting the subtle nuances in answer quality and answer speed across question types, this study is an attempt to explore a territory of CQA research that has hitherto been relatively uncharted.

Given the conflicting results from past research, this paper uses social network analysis (SNA) to empirically determine the relationship between interlocking directorates and corporate profitability. Specifically, it seeks to address two research questions: (1) what relationship exists between the number of director interlocks and companies' profitability? (2) what relationship exists between power within the network of interlocking directorates and companies' profitability? The dataset was drawn from 2010 Fortune 500 companies. Regression models were developed to address the two research questions. To mitigate the effects of confounding factors, three control variables, namely, size, age and sector of the companies were used. Results suggest that both interlocks and power asserted a positive linear relationship with companies' profitability. However, the control variables did not seem to influence these relationships. Moreover, prediction of companies' profitability was found to be a complex undertaking. In conclusion, this paper acknowledges a few limitations and offers suggestions for future research.

Applications that use games to harness human intelligence to perform various computational tasks are increasing in popularity and may be termed human computation games (HCGs). Most HCGs are collaborative in nature, requiring players to cooperate within a game to score points. Competitive versions, where players work against each other, are a more recent entrant, and have been claimed to address shortcomings of collaborative HCGs such as quality of computation. To date, however, little work has been conducted in understanding how different HCG genres influence computational performance and players' perceptions of such. In this paper we study these issues using image tagging HCGs in which users play games to generate keywords for images. Three versions were created: collaborative HCG, competitive HCG, and a control application for manual tagging. The applications were evaluated to uncover the quality of the image tags generated as well as users' perceptions. Results suggest that there is a tension between entertainment and tag quality. While participants reported liking the collaborative and competitive image tagging HCGs over the control application, those using the latter seemed to generate better quality tags. Implications of the work are discussed.

Abstract The confluence of mobile content sharing and pervasive gaming yields new opportunities for developing novel applications on mobile devices. Yet, studies on users' attitudes and behaviors related to mobile gaming, content‐sharing, and retrieval activities (referred to simply as content sharing and gaming) have been lacking. For this reason, the objectives of this article are three‐fold. One, it introduces Indagator, an application that incorporates multiplayer, pervasive gaming elements into mobile content‐sharing activities. Two, it seeks to uncover the motivations for content sharing within a game‐based environment. Three, it aims to identify types of users who are motivated to use Indagator for content sharing. Informed by the uses and gratifications paradigm, a survey was designed and administered to 203 undergraduate and graduate students from two large universities. The findings revealed that perceived gratification factors, such as information discovery, entertainment, information quality, socialization, and relationship maintenance, demographic variables, such as basic familiarity with features of mobile communication devices, and IT‐related backgrounds were significant in predicting intention to use mobile sharing and gaming applications such as Indagator. However, age, gender, and the personal status gratification factor were nonsignificant predictors. This article concludes by presenting the implications, limitations, and future research directions.

Abstract This article analyzes the collaboration trends, authorship and keywords of all research articles published in the Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). Comparing the articles between two 10‐year periods, namely, 1988–1997 and 1998–2007, the three‐fold objectives are to analyze the shifts in (a) authors' collaboration trends (b) top authors, their affiliations as well as the pattern of coauthorship among them, and (c) top keywords and the subdisciplines from which they emerge. The findings reveal a distinct tendency towards collaboration among authors, with external collaborations becoming more prevalent. Top authors have grown in diversity from those being affiliated predominantly with library/information‐related departments to include those from information systems management, information technology, businesss, and the humanities. Amid heterogeneous clusters of collaboration among top authors, strongly connected cross‐disciplinary coauthor pairs have become more prevalent. Correspondingly, the distribution of top keywords' occurrences that leans heavily on core information science has shifted towards other subdisciplines such as information technology and sociobehavioral science.

Abstract This study compares the preparation and response efforts to Katrina and Rita through a knowledge management (KM) perspective. To achieve this objective, a theoretical KM framework is developed to examine the KM processes that underpin disaster management activities. The framework is then used to identify different dimensions along which the two disasters can be compared. The data, totaling some 500 documents, were drawn from a wide variety of news, congressional, and Internet sources. The findings show that the nonchalance towards the disaster's imminence, grossly inadequate preparations, and the chaotic responses seen in Katrina stood in stark contrast to the colossal scale of precautionary measures and response operations primed for Rita. The article concludes by highlighting three KM implications for managing large‐scale natural disasters.

Abstract In contrast to many recent large‐scale catastrophic events, such as the Turkish earthquake in 1999, the 9/11 attack in New York in 2001, the Bali Bombing in 2002, and the Asian Tsunami in 2004, the initial rescue effort towards Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. in 2005 had been sluggish. Even as Congress has promised to convene a formal inquiry into the response to Katrina, this article offers another perspective by analyzing the delayed response through the lens of knowledge management (KM). A KM framework situated in the context of disaster management is developed to study three distinct but overlapping KM processes, namely, knowledge creation, knowledge transfer, and knowledge reuse. Drawing from a total of more than 400 documents—including local, national, and foreign news articles, newswires, congressional reports, and television interview transcripts, as well as Internet resources such as wikipedia and blogs— 14 major delay causes in Katrina are presented. The extent to which the delay causes were a result of the lapses in KM processes within and across the government agencies are discussed.

This paper is an instructional case that describes how the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) has developed a unique, institutionalised knowledge application process. The paper highlights several issues related to knowledge application, including the collection, distillation, and dissemination of knowledge, the role of subject experts in the knowledge application process, and how technology facilitates knowledge application. Interested readers can contact the lead author for a list of questions and suggested answers intended for teaching the process of knowledge application to graduate students.

Abstract Knowledge management is a discipline that has rapidly gained attention from both practitioners and academics over the last decade. However, the number of simulation games designed for knowledge management education has been limited. This is largely due to the emerging nature of knowledge management, whose domain the established gaming and simulation community has yet to enter. For this reason, the value and relevance of knowledge management simulation games is highlighted in this article by detailing the design and implementation of a simulation game entitled The Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO). The study was intended to meet two objectives: (a) to provide a template for designing knowledge management simulation games, and (b) to determine the effectiveness of CKO through a pretest–posttest research design. An empirical study which involved 32 final‐year Business Studies students reading an elective module entitled Knowledge Management Systems in an institute of higher education in Singapore was cond‐ucted. The findings confirmed that CKO was a viable and effective instructional tool for imparting knowledge to the participants. In addition, the scores obtained from CKO had a moderating effect on the participants' attitude towards the subject matter.