Assessment of the Socio Economic Research Portal for the Philippines (SERP-P) Network Capability for Knowledge Sharing / Ronald Anthony Y. Yacat

Year : 2007

Number of Pages : 40 leaves

Executive Summary

The Socio Economic Research Portal for the Philippines (SERP-P) is operational for seven (7) years now. It started with only three (3) member institutions and has grown to twenty five (25). These members are the provider of content for the portal. The content are the results of their researches. For the past seven years (7) there has been a decline in the participation of these members. A brief background of the SERP-P project was given. At the time of the study, there were 20 active and inactive network members. Today, there are about twenty-five (25) network members in the SERP-P, which are mostly inactive. SERP-P became operational in September 2000, during the 23rd founding anniversary of the PIDS. The theme for the anniversary was "Providing the Infrastructure for Research and Networking". As of January 26, 2007, 3,864 research publications or papers from the member institutions are available in the SERP-P. From the 3,864, 3,393 have abstracts and more than 1000 are available in full text format. Around half of the total publications are from the host institution, PIDS. These papers or publications are all available to the public via the SERP-P website. The main focus of the study is to assess the different capabilities for knowledge sharing of the network members and how to encourage active participation of these members. The activities done included the assessment of technological and operational capability of the members, recommendation for the overall improvement of the SERP-P as a portal and recommendation for the methodology to use for the network evaluation. The theoretical background for the study was given in Section 2 of the study. The operation of the SERP-P as a Portal and as a Knowledge Network was highlighted using SERP-P unpublished documents and brochures. The SERP-P is both a portal and a network. The Portal is the technology and interface that supports the network, its operations and activities. The network is the entity which contributes, add content, and therefore add value to the portal. Portals are simply gateways to an available information and knowledge resource. They provide a point of access onto an integrated and structured boy of information about some domain. Today, there are numerous tools available for the development of Portals. Mostly are free, open source softwares that operates in free, open source platforms. These are mostly client-server systems in which databases act as a server, and programs that access and displays the content of the database act as the client. This is the common architecture for any portal systems. Mamboserver Content Management System, the phpNuke and ZOPE are some examples of these free client-server portals. An emerging technology is the Semantic Web Portal that uses meta data standards. The advantages of using such technology were also given. The most noted advantage of the use of semantic portal for SERP-P is that portal content is stored and managed in decentralized web of supplying organizations and individuals, and multiple aggregation and views of the same data is possible. This will lead to significant reduction of content maintenance overhead and accessibility of knowledge for both human and machine agents. Knowledge networks is defined as a number of people and the relationship among them which are assembled in order to accumulate and use knowledge primarily by means of knowledge creation and transfer processes, for the purpose of creating value. The study has reviewed two methodologies for evaluating and assessing knowledge networks. The first one deals with the various characteristics or "distinguishing marks" of knowledge networks. These marks are then used to classify the network and a series of organizational and ICT tools are recommended for different knowledge network classes. The second approach is the one developed by the International Institute for Sustaintable Development which deals with practical evaluation of knowledge networks. Various main parameters such as effectiveness, knowledge network structure and governance, efficiency, resources and sustainability and life-cycle are employed in this assessment methodology.

A framework for analysis was developed for the SERP-P based on the existing documents on system architecture and network operation. This framework was the basis for the different methodology to employ for the study. Three main components of the SERP-P were identified and these are the Portal (technology), the Knowledge and the Network (organization). The Portal has two interfaces, the public and the private (for network members.) This study looked at the technology and the organization through technology assessment and evaluation activities, and network members technological capability survey. The Portal evaluation activity evaluated SERP-P using the following parameters : the grounding technologies which includes systems with creation, publication, organization, maintenance of contents as well as of collaboration features and the information accessibility which primarily assess usability and coverage in terms of maturity of implementations, personalization and collaboration, consistency of information access, and availability of help and other documents. The network members' technological capability survey captured data on updated institution information, the institution's potential contribution, the information technology and networking capabilities and the portal functionalities and contents. The assessment of the overall operation of the network is a huge task and is not fully covered by the study. However, recommendations are given (directed to the SERP-P team) on how to evaluate and assess knowledge networks. This study looked at and assessed the different capabilities of the network members as well as the existing on-line facilities available for these members. Also, recommendation on how to evaluate knowledge networks were presented in this study. The study also yielded a tangible system that serve as the main collaboration facility for network members. The collaboration facility is partly the result of the same capability survey. From the assessment of the portal, the study found out that there are still some functionalities that are lacking to call the SERP-P a real portal. Such claim is especially true with the version 1 of SERP-P. However, there were changes in collaboration facilities when the team developed the version 2 of the SERP-P. The developed collaboration site (as a result of this study) added more collaboration features to the SERP-P. The developed systems including the latest collaboration site used the same grounding technologies in terms of systems architecture. Version 2 of the SERP-P slightly deviated from this claim with the introduction of the content management system to support SERP-P's portal operation. For information processing, the concept of quality control was introduced in version 2. All contributions must first pass through an interface controlled by the SERP-P coordinator before publishing in the public site. In terms of information accessibility, the use of the CMS allowed for the development of personalization and collaboration sites as well as help system through the frequently asked questions or FAQs. A total eighteen (18) network members participated in the survey by accomplishing the questionnaires. Most of the respondents employed information and communications technologies (ICT) in their research related activities and operations. One hundred (100) percent of the respondents uses the personal computers, seventy one (71) percent uses electronic databases and all of the respondents have Internet Connection. As an added value to the study, a collaboration system was developed using feedback and information from survey. The system was named as the "SERP-P Members Portal". Some of the working features of the system are the interface for the SERP-P electronic group (egroup) facility, the social scientist or researchers database and entry forms, research publications database and entry forms, and the links database and entry forms. Based on the review of network evaluation methodology, the SERP-P can be considered as a systematizing network. The portal gives additional value to the shared knowledge (content) by giving additional context to that knowledge. The SERP-P mainly classify the existing knowledge into different categories. To support the operation of SERP-P as a systematizing network, the developer of the evaluation methodology suggested or recommended various tools such as organizational tools and ICT tools such as communication and coordination tools, intelligent tools, etc. At the end of the study, recommendations were made for the Portal and the Knowledge network. Some of the recommendations for the portal included the use of semantic web technologies, the development of additional system hierarchy for the permissions and members access, the development of a comprehensive help system for members and the public, the development and subsequent implementation of training modules for members and the incorporation of some ICT and organizational tools of a systematizing network. Also, it is recommended that a common language like standards, controlled vocabulary, network thesaurus and dictionary should be employed. For the knowledge network, the network team should devise an evaluation methodology partly based on the IISD methodology which dealt with the effectiveness, structure and governance, efficiency, resources and life-cycle of the network. Additional information about the networks members are given in Appendix 1. Appendix 2 presents the survey instrument employed for this study.