How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

[서평]「The Unified Modeling Language User Guide」

/pdf/a-survey-on-internet-of-things-architectures-57ioqohrvj.pdf

A survey on Internet of Things architectures

The role of big data in smart city

Purpose: This paper investigates the way in which blockchain technology is likely to influence future supply chain practices and policies. Design/methodology/approach: A systematic review of both academic and practitioner literature was conducted. Multiple accounts of blockchain adoption within industry were also consulted to gain further insight. Findings: While blockchain technologies remain in their infancy, they are gaining momentum within supply chains, trust being the predominant factor driving their adoption. The value of such technologies for supply chain management lies in four areas: extended visibility and traceability, supply chain digitalisation and disintermediation, improved data security and smart contracts. Several challenges and gaps in understanding and opportunities for further research are identified by our research. How a blockchain enabled supply chain should be configured has also been explored from a design perspective. Research limitations/implications: Our systematic review focuses on the diffusion of blockchain technology within supply chains and great care was taken in selecting search terms. However, we acknowledge that our choice of terms may have excluded certain blockchain articles from this review. Practical implications: This paper offers valuable insight for supply-chain practitioners into how blockchain technology has the potential to disrupt existing supply chain provisions as well as a number of challenges to its successful diffusion. Originality/value: Ours is one of the first studies to examine the current state of blockchain diffusion within supply chains. It lays a firm foundation for future research. Keywords: blockchain, distributed ledger technology, supply chain management, peer-to-peer communication, systematic literature review

/pdf/understanding-blockchain-technology-for-future-supply-chains-382nu4vul4.pdf

Understanding blockchain technology for future supply chains: a systematic literature review and research agenda

Home automation has recently gained a new momentum thanks to the ever-increasing commercial availability of domotic components In this context, researchers are working to provide interoperation mechanisms and to add intelligence on top of them For supporting intelligent behaviors, house modeling is an essential requirement to understand current and future house states and to possibly drive more complex actions In this paper we propose a new house modeling ontology designed to fit real world domotic system capabilities and to support interoperation between currently available and future solutions Taking advantage of technologies developed in the context of the Semantic Web, the DogOnt ontology supports device/network independent description of houses, including both "controllable" and architectural elements States and functionalities are automatically associated to the modeled elements through proper inheritance mechanisms and by means of properly defined SWRL auto-completion rules which ease the modeling process, while automatic device recognition is achieved through classification reasoning

/pdf/dogont-ontology-modeling-for-intelligent-domotic-4ae8pnt4a2.pdf

DogOnt - Ontology Modeling for Intelligent Domotic Environments

Review of the state-of-the-art in patent information and forthcoming evolutions in intelligent patent informatics

This paper moves a first step towards the creation of Intelligent Domotic Environments (IDE) in real-life home-living. A new Domotic OSGi Gateway (DOG) is presented, able to manage different domotic networks as a single, technology neutral, home automation system. The adoption of a standard framework such as OSGi, and of sophisticated modeling techniques stemming from the Semantic Web research community, allows DOG to go beyond simple automation and to support reasoning-based intelligence inside home environments. By exploiting automatic device generalization, syntactic and semantic command validation, and internetwork scenario definition, DOG provides the building blocks for supporting the evolution of current, isolated, home automation plants into IDEs, where heterogeneous devices and domotic systems are coordinated to behave as a single, intelligent, proactive system. The paper introduces the DOG architecture and the underlying ontology modeling. A case study is also illustrated, where DOG controls a laboratory reconstruction of a simple domotic environment.

The DOG gateway: enabling ontology-based intelligent domotic environments

https://iris.polito.it/bitstream/11583/2465381/1/energySurvey.pdf

Home energy consumption feedback: A user survey

In this paper a new approach to ontology visualization is introduced, using a more than 3-dimensional space. The ontology information is represented on a 3D view-port enriched by visual cues. A preliminary application based on the presented principles is described, and results show that the approach is feasible and can actually lead to a more effective modeling process and to an easy detection of “conceptual inconsistencies”. The opinions of domain experts are also quite positive and seem to indicate that the approach is promising and can be extended for creating “user friendly” ontology editors for people with low ICT skills.

/pdf/ontosphere-more-than-a-3d-ontology-visualization-tool-3sfuftsp6f.pdf

Dario Bonino

Papers

DogOnt - Ontology Modeling for Intelligent Domotic Environments

Review of the state-of-the-art in patent information and forthcoming evolutions in intelligent patent informatics

The DOG gateway: enabling ontology-based intelligent domotic environments

Home energy consumption feedback: A user survey

OntoSphere: more than a 3D ontology visualization tool