A Guide To Agency Wide Knowledge Management For State Departments Of Transportation

Author : Spy Pond Partners, LLC (Arlington, MA).
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780309446358
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (463 download)

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Download or read book Improving Findability and Relevance of Transportation Information written by Spy Pond Partners, LLC (Arlington, MA). and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term "information" encompasses a variety of content and formats; for example, printed documents, written and electronic data files, maps, images, audio, and video files. Information collectively is a valuable asset for any organization, but finding the right information to support mission-critical analysis and decisionmaking is often difficult. The information assets of a state department of transportation (DOT) may exist in many forms, both structured and unstructured. (Experts estimate that 80-90% of information is unstructured and that an agency's employees may spend up to 35% of their time looking for information.) Organizations, public and private, invest in information-management systems designed to make information available in useful forms when and where it is needed. Information findability means ensuring that information users have access to the information they need, when they need it. A variety of tools have been developed to support findability, such as ontologies and metadata frameworks; taxonomies and other structured vocabularies; format and location conventions (e.g., Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or Digital Object Identifier (DOI)); practices for engaging subject-matter experts in the work of maintaining information and making it accessible; and more. General principles and procedures that are developed for information management may be useful in many fields of knowledge, but each particular field--health care, law, transportation, and others--may require adaptations to make the tools more effective and efficient in serving the field's practitioners. At the same time, procedures and tools developed for specific applications may be adaptable to enhance information findability in other fields. Some work has been done within the DOT community to improve information findability. The Transportation Research Thesaurus (TRT), the Freight Data Dictionary, and the creation of topical web portals such as American Association of State Highway and Transportation Official's (AASHTO's) Workforce Toolkit or the United States department of Transportation (USDOT) Climate Change Clearinghouse are examples. the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 754: Improving Management of Transportation Information was recently published. However, much remains to be done. The quantities of information a DOT must use are growing exponentially. Technologies for information acquisition, archiving, and retrieval are evolving rapidly. Research is needed to advance practices of capture, archiving, and retrieval of information about the surface transportation systems for which state DOTs and other transportation agencies are responsible. Improving findability of transportation information by advancing practices for information classification, search, and retrieval represents a high-priority initial target for this research. Applying such practices to unstructured information in particular is a pressing challenge. Tools and procedures for technology-assisted review, development of micro-thesauri, application of "folksonomies" integrated with more formally defined taxonomic schemes, and the like, offer potential value for dealing with unstructured transportation information. The objective of this research is to improve state DOT information findability by (1) defining a management framework--including responsibilities of a transportation agency and its partners--for classification, search, and retrieval of transportation information; (2) describing successful practices for organizing and classifying information (e.g., ontologies or metadata schemas) that can be adapted to classification, search, and retrieval of the diversity of information a transportation agency creates and uses; (3) developing federated or enterprise search procedures that a DOT can use to make transportation information available to users, subject to concerns for security and confidentiality; and (4) undertaking an example implementation of the management framework, the organization and classification practices, and search procedures to demonstrate enhanced findability for a DOT's data. The research product should be a final report presenting the research results in a way that informs DOT staff of effective practices to improve information findability and facilitates adoption of these practices.