Melbourne Students & Learning - Research Publications

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    Context entity analysis: using public domain knowledge to build information infrastructure
    MCCARTHY, GAVAN ; JONES, MICHAEL ; VINES, RICHARD ; LEWIS, ANTONINA ( 2012)
    The purpose of this paper is to surface in an explicit way the challenges of corporate self-knowledge. The emphasis is on how corporations, and the individuals that comprise them, provide public access to authoritative records and information that adequately explains who they are, what they do, how they function, and the ways important organisational narratives evolve through time. The paper reports on a case study completed by the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre in December 2011, for a Division of a Victorian Government agency, Australia, the Department of Primary Industries (DPI). The study utilised a research and analytical methodology called Context Entity Analysis (CEA). CEA provides a means through which knowledge resources generated using narrative techniques, such as reports, journal articles, books, or websites can be utilised to create open complex networks of entities that more closely mirror the multiplicity of what actually happens, both within corporations and at the intersection between corporations and the citizenry.
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    Shaping the context for an integrated knowledge hub for the dairy and grains industry project: managing knowledge in the public sphere – ‘lessons learned’
    JONES, MICHAEL ; MCCARTHY, GAVAN ( 2011)
    In 2011, the Victorian Department of Primary Industries (DPI) undertook a “proof of concept” project related to the design and development of two integrated knowledge hubs for the dairy and grains industry sectors. The University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) was engaged to provide advice on how structured online knowledge could contribute to the provision of persistent, authoritative information to farmers and industry service providers. For more than 25 years, the ESRC and its predecessors have operated as both academic centres and focal points for infrastructure design, testing and deployment. The Centre has been a key collaborator in more than twenty online knowledge resources dating back to the earliest days of the web, all of which remain accessible in some form or another to this day. In delivering this report, ‘Managing Knowledge in the Public Sphere – “Lessons Learned”,’ the authors draw on these experiences to present findings for consideration by DPI.
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    Reducing the burden, increasing the impact: enabling the growth of quality-knowledge within the Victorian Community Sector. [Reports 1 and 2]
    VINES, RICHARD ; MCCARTHY, GAVAN ; JONES, MICHAEL ; Kirk, Chris ( 2009 - 2010)
    These reports were prepared for the Office of the Community Sector’s Better Integrated Standards and Quality Assurance Systems (BISQAS) initiative. The core challenges being addressed are the problems of regulatory burdens arising from multiple quality standards. Five community sector quality standards (encompassing the Family Service and Out of Home Care, Disabilities, Housing, Home and Community Care, and Family Relationship Services Program sectors were mapped against each other. The reports identify opportunities and constraints if information and communication technologies were to be used toreduce regulatory burden through enhanced efficiencies associated with publishing quality standards and managing evidence files across multiple funded programs.The second report outlines how information and communication technologies can be used by divergent stakeholders to achieve the twin objectives of reducing burden and enhancing knowledge capacity.
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    Cities, human well-being and the environment: conceiving national regulatory knowledge systems to facilitate resilient knowledge, knowledge based development and inter-generational knowing
    VINES, RICHARD ; MCCARTHY, GAVAN ; Kirk, Chris ; JONES, MICHAEL ( 2010)
    In this paper, we discuss the idea of resilient knowledge and how the concept of knowledge-based development might be conceived as scientific discipline, and on what basis. Discussion is presented in two sections. In the first section we explore the idea of the epistemic loss of knowledge. We suggest this type of knowledge loss occurs where there is inadequate preservation of the knowledge necessary to explain the context, structure and meaning of information through time. We provide a brief overview of an emergent approach that could address this problem – an approach called contextual information management. In the second section, we document examples of how this new approach might be harnessed to create a framework for a (national) regulatory knowledge system. We draw upon one particular case study: the conception of quality standards within the Victorian Community Sector. By extrapolation, we suggest these ideas could well have wider applications – for example, the harmonisation of regulatory standards across State and Commonwealth areas of jurisdiction. By extension, it is suggested the focus of regulatory interventions should not be on compliance per se, but on creating a shared context between Government, stakeholders and citizens to support the dynamics of problem solving, knowledge acquisition and what we call evolutionary possibility.