INFS 770 - Knowledge Management for E-Business

Course Objectives:

This course addresses the issues involved in creating the Intelligent Enterprise.  We will focus on topics related to knowledge creation, dissemination, stewardship, and management.  We will also address the emerging e-business frameworks and the problems and issues that confront companies wishing to adopt and use e-business models, methodologies, processes, and architectures. 

Topics Covered:

The major topics we will address include:

• Knowledge Management:  organizational, technological and management perspectives,
• E-Business: frameworks, methodologies, and business processes,
• Business Rules: representation, processing, and management,
• E-Marketplaces: functions, processes, and organizations.
• XML (eXtensible Markup Language): the lingua franca of e-business,
• Business-to-Business (B2B E-Commerce): business process integration and interoperation.
• Intellectual Property and Digital Rights Management: creation, distribution, protection, utilization, and management.
• E-Business Security: issues, tools, and techniques.

Grading Policy:

Your grade in the course will be determined by grades obtained on a group research project (both group and individual components), homework assignments, project presentations, class participation, and a final exam. The breakdown of the percentages is the following :

• Research Project 25%
• Research Presentation 25%
• Class Participation 15%
• Final Exam 35%

In the group projects, students form teams to perform research dealing with topics relevant to the course themes. A mechanism for peer review of team members will be used to assess each member's participation in the project.

The student is responsible for performing the work in each category, and the work is to be completed during the semester in which the course is taken. So as to avoid embarrassing situations at the end of the semester, such as requests for a grade of incomplete, there will be well-defined milestones with deliverables (please refer to the table). There are no incompletes in INFS 770!

Research Project:

There are several goals for the research projects:

• to help you to understand the relevant issues in Knowledge Management, Enterprise Modeling, Business Processes and Rules, and E-Business methods and tools,
• to put into practice the concepts, methods and tools discussed in the course and in the open literature, and
• to advance the state-of-the-art of the Intelligent Knowledge-based E-Business.

Finally, you will learn by doing in this course.

Suggested Topics:

• Service-oriented Architectures and Web Services.
• Methodologies for Semantic Web Services.
• Knowledge Sifter: Ontology-Based Search over Heterogeneous Data/Knowledge Sources.
• Acme Enterprise Case Study (HTML and WORD)
• Methodology for E-Business Application Development.
• Standards-based Business Process Methods and Tools.
• Intelligent Search Tools for Web Services.  Extending the Knowledge Sifter prototype using agents and web services.
• E-Business Marketplaces: Concepts and Tools.
• B2B E-Commerce: the role of XML for data and process interoperation.
• Security and E-Business: Meta-data, data and transactions.
• Knowledge Management: Theory, Frameworks and Practice.
• Knowledge Management and the E-Business Lifecycle: From Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
• XML, RDF and Internet Resources for E-Business.
• Active repository management for federated enterprise databases.
• Business rules for E-Business: models, methods, engines.
• Active databases and dictionaries for enterprise integration: Integrating production systems, meta-data and databases.
• Knowledge Rovers: Intelligent agents for Internet resource discovery.
• Object Request Brokers, CORBA and E-Business
• Data Warehousing and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP)

Updated: January 26, 2005