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188 Chapter 6

Personalization: Many-to-one interactions

Office

Store

School
Library
…….?

The one-person:
Figure 6.2
Illustration of the personalization concept

of use here is the Bloom taxonomy of learning objectives ( Bloom, Mesia, and Krath-
wohl 1964 ) that was designed to help teachers set learning goals for learning activities.
The taxonomy can be easily adapted to knowledge application goals for each knowl-
edge object in a repository.
One way of visualizing personalization is to think of the one-person company or
the one-person library. All of the knowledge resources in a given repository can be
made to appear as if they were there at the disposal of a given person, refl ecting their
preferences, their background, and so forth. Figure 6.2 illustrates this concept of
“ many-to-one ” interactions.
Personalization and profi ling is currently a popular means of characterizing visitors
to a given web site. This is particularly true of virtual stores where customer data can
then be analyzed in order to improve marketing efforts. However, in KM, we are less
concerned with database marketing applications of personalization than with ensuring
that information retrieval; and knowledge application processes are tailor-made for
each knowledge worker. The easier it is for a knowledge worker to fi nd, understand,
and internalize the knowledge, the greater their success in actually applying this
knowledge. An alternative approach to user modeling is proposed in fi gure 6.3 .
Instead of using profi ling technologies to better understand all customers, we can
make use of similar techniques to follow or trace a given individual ’ s interactions with
a number of corporate memory interfaces. This alternative approach will yield a user
model. This model will help us to better understand the types of human-knowledge
interactions that have occurred in order to optimize knowledge application within the