Technical Architecture of Enabling Body of Knowledge System for Effective Learning and Information Dissemination

In the current era of knowledge explosion, many fields are witnessing a tremendous amount of research and practice reported on a regular basis. How to help people effectively and efficiently study state-of-the-art knowledge in a specific field has become an urgent task yet highly challenging. On top of the Internet as an unstructured knowledge base, this paper reports the design and development of a Body of Knowledge portal (BoK), which can be used as a novel learning environment. Leveraging the key technologies of services computing (Web 2.0, Web services and Service-Oriented Architecture), a BoK provides a uniform gateway for researchers and practitioners to seamlessly study and organize knowledge from heterogeneous data sources. A service-oriented knowledge delivery mechanism is key to a BoK centered on configurable delivery protocols. As services computing having evolved as the foundational discipline supporting modern services industry, the authors used the field as an example to illustrate the technical architecture that enables the establishment of BoK in services computing. Information dissemination of BoK on mobile delivery platform is explored as well. Performance data analysis is also reported on the BoK infrastructure.