Speaker: Athula Ginige, WSU

Seminar Date: Tuesday May 24 2016, 12.00pm

Abstract: Today ever increasing amounts of digital information is getting produced.  To generate value from this information, relevant information should reach the people when they need it empowering them to take optimal set of actions to meet their needs. Providing such information is still a challenge. Increasing take-up of Smartphones and the resulting digitally connected society has opened up new possibilities to address this challenge. To better understand how this connectivity can be effectively used to enhance outcomes a project was initiated to develop a Mobile Based Information System (MBIS) for farmers in Sri Lanka. The aim was to provide farmers and other stakeholders in the agriculture domain with context specific actionable information to make optimal decisions.  The term actionable information refers to such information that will enable a stakeholder to act with least amount of further processing. The research challenge was to discover a way to generate context specific actionable information to support decision making throughout all stages of a farming cycle in a way to empower users. To initiate the information flow published knowledge relevant to the domain activities were disaggregated to provide context specific actionable information.  A system was devised for users to act on this information generating transaction data which in turn was aggregated or disaggregated to provide new actionable information. This mechanism will keep the information flowing in the system similar to biological ecosystems. Thus MBIS evolved into a Digital Knowledge Ecosystem. Since its deployment we observed many new major stakeholder groups are joining the system confirming the correctness of the ecosystem design.  It was found the evolved Digital Knowledge Ecosystem architecture and the approach to develop the system is very generic and can be applied to other domains such as healthcare and business to enhance information flow among key stakeholders, thus empowering the users. At present there are two projects in healthcare domain were Digital Knowledge Ecosystem approach being used; chronic disease management and supporting child health development. In this seminar I will first present the Digital Knowledge Ecosystem concept and show how this concept has been used in the above two projects.