Research

I hold a doctoral degree in Informatics from March 2002. My thesis Designing the new intranet addresses organisational intranets from a Knowledge Management perspective. My research has been a joint venture between Volvo IT, the Viktoria Institute, a Swedish Research Institute focusing on IT, and the department of Informatics at Göteborg University. My research interest has shifted slightly over time but it has always had the intranet as the technology platform around which work has circled. The focus is and has always been on intra-organisational technology usage for information and knowledge sharing.

I am a member of theKnowledge Management Hub and employed as a researcher at the Department of Informatics at the Göteborg University since September 2002. The KM hub has a rather impressive track record and you'll find a quite impressive list of results on the KMH homepage. My own contributions are found on my Publications page. I currently teach at the IT University in Gothenburg where I give a course in Knowledge Management and supervise the Masters Thesis work.

In November 2004 the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research (FAS) granted us funds to start a new research project entitled

individualisation and cotextualisation of unstructured information: strategies and techniques for decreasing information overload

This project is seeking to answer the following research questions:

1. How do individual employees use their organisation's intranet in order to find information?
2. How do modern organisations utilise their intranets to disseminate information?
3. How is individualisation and contextualisation of information managed in today's organisations?
4. How should information services of the future be designed to lessen the information overload?

Beside myself, this project currently engages Dr. Kalevi Pessi and PhD candidate Fredric Landqvist.

To better understand how search engines are used within organisations, I am now analysing some 30.000 log entries from the intranet search engine at Volvo . A first draft is being evaluated and hopefully it will show up at my publication page early next year. My approach is to compare and contrast my findings to that of Spinks and Jansen, who are leading authorities on public search engine usage. Does intranets differ from the Intranet? In what way(s)?

Previously, I looked at how domain knowledge could be used to help users find info on a company intranet. I experimented using semantic nets to represent the knowledge and use that knowledge to augment search queries. I implemented a prototype which provided some promising results. The big problem is how to get the data into the semantic net. I only entered a small subset and it still was much work. We therefore decided to use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to automatically find related words and build a domain-specific thesaurus. This provided me with some very interesting results which I'm currently writing up for a conference.

As the information flood continues to grow, techniques such as intelligent filtering and smart agents become more and more necessary and I'm planning to do something in that area. We have developed a USENET agent that monitors the Internet News groups and alerts users when relevant data is entered. In April 1998 we started a larger project aimed at study how intelligent software agents could be used to build communities and facilitate information sharing within an organisation. Read the details on my Agent page. A second phase of this work will run during the winter of 1999/2000 as part of the KM-project.

I also try to maintain a list of conferences that are of interest to me and my research. It contains all the call-for-paper deadlines and word limits.