Social Intelligence in Personal Knowledge Management using Software Agents

The concept embodying agent-mediated personal knowledge management (PKM) manifests a bottom-up process of organisational knowledge management (OKM) in achieving collective goals. Exploiting this concept from the perspective of crossing organisational boundaries and into the realm of social network, the concept of social intelligence is proposed. Social intelligence has been defined in many aspects, one of which is the sociability characteristics of a software agent in performing tasks over a social network. In modelling the PKM framework, intelligent agents are assigned with tasks to assist their human counterparts, where the PKM processes are enacted as a series of getting, understanding, and sharing knowledge and connecting to others for knowledge, over the social network. The critical issue is to identify and ‘locate’ knowledge experts for further enlightenment of one’s personal knowledge. Considering the advantages of social network and the congruence between PKM processes and Nonaka’s SECI model, the emergence of social intelligence is investigated in this paper by analysing the responses to a questionnaire survey on PKM processes. This paper also discusses the limitations of this research vis-à-vis the current practice in which the e-mail is predominantly used to manage personal knowledge. In resolving the issues identified, a nodal approach to agent-mediated PKM is proposed to model the emergence of social intelligence, where knowledge workers work cooperatively with software agents in a virtual workspace called a node. It then analyses the processes by characterising these nodes as intelligent social entities.