INFORMATION VISUALIZATION TO SUPPORT MANAGEMENT DECISIONS

Information visualization can accelerate perception, provide insight and control, and harness this flood of valuable data to gain a competitive advantage in making business decisions. Although such a statement seems to be obvious, there is a lack in the literature of practical evidence of the benefit of information visualization. The main contribution of this paper is to illustrate how, for a major European apparel retailer, the visualization of performance information plays a critical role in improving business decisions and in extracting insights from Redio Frequency Idetification (RFID)-based performance measures. In this paper, we identify - based on a literature review - three fundamental managerial functions of information visualization, namely as: a communication medium, a knowledge management means, and a decision-support instrument. Then, we provide - based on real industrial case evidence - how information visualization supports business decision-making. Several examples are provided to evidence the benefit of information visualization through its three identified managerial functions. We find that - depending on the way performance information is shaped, communicated, and made interactive - it not only helps decision making, but also offers a means of knowledge creation, as well as an appropriate communication channel. © 2014 World Scientific Publishing Company.

Improving design quality and value in the built environment through knowledge of intangibles

Raising design quality and value in the built environment requires continuous improvement, drawing on feedback from clients or occupiers and other industry players. The challenging task for architectural and engineering designers has always been to use their intellectual knowledge to deliver both forms of benefits, tangibles and intangibles, in the built environment. Increasingly as clients demand best value for money, there is a greater need to understand the potential from intangibles, to see projects not as ends in themselves but as means to improved quality of life and wealth creation. As we begin to understand more about how - through the design of the built environment - to deliver these improvements in outcomes, clients will be better placed to expect their successful delivery from designers, and designers themselves will be better placed to provide them. This paper discusses cross-disciplinary issues about intangibles and is aimed at designers, clients, investors and entrepreneurs within the built environment. It presents some findings from a minuscule study that investigated intangible benefits in a new primary school. © 2004 IEEE.

The retrieval of structured design rationale for the re-use of design knowledge with an integrated representation

Design knowledge can be acquired from various sources and generally requires an integrated representation for its effective and efficient re-use. Though knowledge about products and processes can illustrate the solutions created (know-what) and the courses of actions (know-how) involved in their creation, the reasoning process (know-why) underlying the solutions and actions is still needed for an integrated representation of design knowledge. Design rationale is an effective way of capturing that missing part, since it records the issues addressed, the options considered, and the arguments used when specific design solutions are created and evaluated. Apart from the need for an integrated representation, effective retrieval methods are also of great importance for the re-use of design knowledge, as the knowledge involved in designing complex products can be huge. Developing methods for the retrieval of design rationale is very useful as part of the effective management of design knowledge, for the following reasons. Firstly, design engineers tend to want to consider issues and solutions before looking at solid models or process specifications in detail. Secondly, design rationale is mainly described using text, which often embodies much relevant design knowledge. Last but not least, design rationale is generally captured by identifying elements and their dependencies, i.e. in a structured way which opens the opportunity for going beyond simple keyword-based searching. In this paper, the management of design rationale for the re-use of design knowledge is presented. The retrieval of design rationale records in particular is discussed in detail. As evidenced in the development and evaluation, the methods proposed are useful for the re-use of design knowledge and can be generalised to be used for the retrieval of other kinds of structured design knowledge. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

SiGMa: Simple Greedy Matching for Aligning Large Knowledge Bases

The Internet has enabled the creation of a growing number of large-scale knowledge bases in a variety of domains containing complementary information. Tools for automatically aligning these knowledge bases would make it possible to unify many sources of structured knowledge and answer complex queries. However, the efficient alignment of large-scale knowledge bases still poses a considerable challenge. Here, we present Simple Greedy Matching (SiGMa), a simple algorithm for aligning knowledge bases with millions of entities and facts. SiGMa is an iterative propagation algorithm which leverages both the structural information from the relationship graph as well as flexible similarity measures between entity properties in a greedy local search, thus making it scalable. Despite its greedy nature, our experiments indicate that SiGMa can efficiently match some of the world's largest knowledge bases with high precision. We provide additional experiments on benchmark datasets which demonstrate that SiGMa can outperform state-of-the-art approaches both in accuracy and efficiency.