A rchive Date
[ 12-06-2000 ]
Category
[ Information Technologies ]
sub-Categoy
[ Lotus ]
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[http://www.lotus.com/home.nsf/welcome/km
Project Raven: An Overview
Raven is a key element of Lotus' overall knowledge management strategy, which includes services, methodologies and solutions from Lotus and IBM, all captured under the unifying theme of "People, Places & Things". Raven contains a portal, which organizes assets by community, interest, task or job focus; and a discovery engine, which categorizes content and organizational expertise into a browsable and searchable catalog.
Lotus recognizes that knowledge management goes far beyond mere technology. In this spirit, as a knowledge platform, Raven includes a written methodology on how to map technology to personal, team, cultural and organizational dynamics; and application templates that directly incorporate that methodology.
See also:
 Raven Q&A
 Raven Press Release
 Press Quotes
As a KM platform, Raven fully leverages the Domino messaging and groupware platform. Where messaging and groupware bring people together to collaborate and create content, Raven helps to identify the appropriate candidates for a team, creates specialized places that foster productive collaboration, and gathers the content relevant to the project at hand. Lotus captures these broad collaborative functions in the theme People, Places & Things. That is, Raven not only delivers the right information to the right people at the right time, but also creates the places where the right people can work together at the right time.
Knowledge Portal
Raven's knowledge portal organizes all of a user's information, applications and contacts by community, interest, task or job focus. It is a shell environment that builds and manages portals for each individual and all that user's community affiliations. Users create a personal portal by selecting from a list of pre-configured Knowledge Windows (e.g. mail, calendar, discussions, to do items, Teamrooms, custom applications, web sites). Knowledge windows are extensible and can support any Domino or non-Domino application. One of the knowledge windows is the Hotlist, which displays the status of a user's most important information and applications (e.g. mail from a list of important people, documents awaiting approval, new or updated tasks in a teamroom). The portal includes multiple "places." These places can be user-defined, created by departmental or enterprise IT departments, or developed and shared by colleagues.
Each user's portal provides access to a list of other authorized places, or communities, in which users can enroll. Community places (e.g., a "personnel review place" or a "new product brainstorming places") represent an occupational -based user interface where the user spends time monitoring status and participating in action and decision making. For example, a "personnel review place" might include an HR reporting application, a job posting application, a policies and procedures manual, a list of employees under review, and a list of HR staff available for consultation. This is especially useful for new employees or for people switching jobs within an organization. The portal saves end users' valuable time by "introducing" them to the people, applications and information assets that every user needs to be productive in his or her job.
Discovery Engine
The discovery engine crawls through documents to infer meaning, value and relationships amongst people and content. On the basis of what the Raven engine discovers, it creates a browsable catalog of content and expertise. The catalog is a "table of contents" of all the written information and internal expertise that exists within an organization. The engine constantly refreshes the catalog by tracking user characteristics and usage activity. The result is a system that reflects much about an organization in terms of where things are, who knows what, what is important, and what subjects generate the most interest and interactivity. The discovery engine has two main components: an expertise locator and a content catalog.
Expertise Locator - builds and maintains profiles in a repository that can be queried directly by users to locate experts by skill, experience, project, education, job type and many other attributes. The profiles are created through a variety of measures: drawing demographic data drawn from any LDAP directory; field mapping from specific applications such as teamrooms, discussions, and project tracking. The expertise locator also uses a metrics tool to determine affinities between subject matter and user activity to infer interests and expertise. Before adding this discovered content to an individual profile, Raven presents the end user with the update, which must be approved by him or her before it can be published and searched by the departmental or enterprise population.
Content Catalog - crawls text sources (including text about people) to identify subject matter topics. It analyzes content by looking for frequency, proximity to other topics, relationship to people and a host of other measures. From this information the content catalog groups similar content into browsable categories, called a content map, which it constantly maintains and updates as it receives new content and usage data. Raven's content catalog then derives people's skills from content they have authored or read and maps them to the categories alongside documents. The catalog continually analyzes new content to calculate usage patterns and relationships to determine the value and relevance of people and content to one another. By subscribing to specific categories that interest them, users can direct their knowledge portals to deliver to them relevant information about news, projects, people and organizational structure. Raven uses IBM's DB2 Universal Database as the underlying technology to manage the catalog and the complex analyses required to sift through millions of documents.
Application Templates
With Raven Lotus will provide not only the kingdom of KM but the keys as well. These "key" are broad, practical solutions that illustrate Raven functionality. They are comprised of application templates that will usefully apply the features of Raven and printed methodology covering organizational tips on deployment. They will include such applications as a Reuse Repository for capturing knowledge, a Project Place for managing projects, a New Idea Generator for doing Collaborative Brainstorming, a Rapid Response Place for responding to unexpected events and opportunities. Beyond these there are complete end-to-end solutions and offerings focused on particular business opportunities that incorporate services.
Raven: KM Infrastructure
Raven is a layer of infrastructure that sits on top of an existing messaging, collaboration and information infrastructure. Raven fully leverages Lotus Domino, Lotus Sametime and DB2. For example, Raven's authentication and roles-based security is based on Domino's access control lists. Anywhere a person's name is listed, Lotus Sametime's awareness capabilities allow an end user to see if that person is currently on-line and available. From within any knowledge window or document, and end user can initiate a Sametime instant messaging session simply by clicking on the person's name. DB2 is embedded to provide the scalability needed to support millions of documents and hundreds of thousands of users. When installing a Raven server, Domino, Sametime and DB2 are installed and configured as part of the product. The Raven server is accessible from Microsoft and Netscape browsers, as well as Notes clients. ]
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