• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.19-43
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• 2014

The Pareto principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes for many events including natural phenomena. It has been recognized as a golden rule in business with a wide application of such discovery like 20 percent of customers resulting in 80 percent of total sales. On the other hand, the Long Tail theory, pointing out that "the trivial many" produces more value than "the vital few," has gained popularity in recent times with a tremendous reduction of distribution and inventory costs through the development of ICT(Information and Communication Technology). This study started with a view to illuminating how these two primary business paradigms-Pareto principle and Long Tail theory-relates to the success of virtual knowledge collaboration. The importance of virtual knowledge collaboration is soaring in this era of globalization and virtualization transcending geographical and temporal constraints. Many previous studies on knowledge sharing have focused on the factors to affect knowledge sharing, seeking to boost individual knowledge sharing and resolve the social dilemma caused from the fact that rational individuals are likely to rather consume than contribute knowledge. Knowledge collaboration can be defined as the creation of knowledge by not only sharing knowledge, but also by transforming and integrating such knowledge. In this perspective of knowledge collaboration, the relative distribution of knowledge sharing among participants can count as much as the absolute amounts of individual knowledge sharing. In particular, whether the more contribution of the upper 20 percent of participants in knowledge sharing will enhance the efficiency of overall knowledge collaboration is an issue of interest. This study deals with the effect of this sort of knowledge sharing distribution on the efficiency of knowledge collaboration and is extended to reflect the work characteristics. All analyses were conducted based on actual data instead of self-reported questionnaire surveys. More specifically, we analyzed the collaborative behaviors of editors of 2,978 English Wikipedia featured articles, which are the best quality grade of articles in English Wikipedia. We adopted Pareto ratio, the ratio of the number of knowledge contribution of the upper 20 percent of participants to the total number of knowledge contribution made by the total participants of an article group, to examine the effect of Pareto principle. In addition, Gini coefficient, which represents the inequality of income among a group of people, was applied to reveal the effect of inequality of knowledge contribution. Hypotheses were set up based on the assumption that the higher ratio of knowledge contribution by more highly motivated participants will lead to the higher collaboration efficiency, but if the ratio gets too high, the collaboration efficiency will be exacerbated because overall informational diversity is threatened and knowledge contribution of less motivated participants is intimidated. Cox regression models were formulated for each of the focal variables-Pareto ratio and Gini coefficient-with seven control variables such as the number of editors involved in an article, the average time length between successive edits of an article, the number of sections a featured article has, etc. The dependent variable of the Cox models is the time spent from article initiation to promotion to the featured article level, indicating the efficiency of knowledge collaboration. To examine whether the effects of the focal variables vary depending on the characteristics of a group task, we classified 2,978 featured articles into two categories: Academic and Non-academic. Academic articles refer to at least one paper published at an SCI, SSCI, A&HCI, or SCIE journal. We assumed that academic articles are more complex, entail more information processing and problem solving, and thus require more skill variety and expertise. The analysis results indicate the followings; First, Pareto ratio and inequality of knowledge sharing relates in a curvilinear fashion to the collaboration efficiency in an online community, promoting it to an optimal point and undermining it thereafter. Second, the curvilinear effect of Pareto ratio and inequality of knowledge sharing on the collaboration efficiency is more sensitive with a more academic task in an online community.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.177-189
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• 2013

In Smart Education, the roles of digital textbook is very important as face-to-face media to learners. The standardization of digital textbook will promote the industrialization of digital textbook for contents providers and distributers as well as learner and instructors. In this study, the following three objectives-oriented digital textbooks are looking for ways to standardize. (1) digital textbooks should undertake the role of the media for blended learning which supports on-off classes, should be operating on common EPUB viewer without special dedicated viewer, should utilize the existing framework of the e-learning learning contents and learning management. The reason to consider the EPUB as the standard for digital textbooks is that digital textbooks don't need to specify antoher standard for the form of books, and can take advantage od industrial base with EPUB standards-rich content and distribution structure (2) digital textbooks should provide a low-cost open market service that are currently available as the standard open software (3) To provide appropriate learning feedback information to students, digital textbooks should provide a foundation which accumulates and manages all the learning activity information according to standard infrastructure for educational Big Data processing. In this study, the digital textbook in a smart education environment was referred to open digital textbook. The components of open digital textbooks service framework are (1) digital textbook terminals such as smart pad, smart TVs, smart phones, PC, etc., (2) digital textbooks platform to show and perform digital contents on digital textbook terminals, (3) learning contents repository, which exist on the cloud, maintains accredited learning, (4) App Store providing and distributing secondary learning contents and learning tools by learning contents developing companies, and (5) LMS as a learning support/management tool which on-site class teacher use for creating classroom instruction materials. In addition, locating all of the hardware and software implement a smart education service within the cloud must have take advantage of the cloud computing for efficient management and reducing expense. The open digital textbooks of smart education is consdered as providing e-book style interface of LMS to learners. In open digital textbooks, the representation of text, image, audio, video, equations, etc. is basic function. But painting, writing, problem solving, etc are beyond the capabilities of a simple e-book. The Communication of teacher-to-student, learner-to-learnert, tems-to-team is required by using the open digital textbook. To represent student demographics, portfolio information, and class information, the standard used in e-learning is desirable. To process learner tracking information about the activities of the learner for LMS(Learning Management System), open digital textbook must have the recording function and the commnincating function with LMS. DRM is a function for protecting various copyright. Currently DRMs of e-boook are controlled by the corresponding book viewer. If open digital textbook admitt DRM that is used in a variety of different DRM standards of various e-book viewer, the implementation of redundant features can be avoided. Security/privacy functions are required to protect information about the study or instruction from a third party UDL (Universal Design for Learning) is learning support function for those with disabilities have difficulty in learning courses. The open digital textbook, which is based on E-book standard EPUB 3.0, must (1) record the learning activity log information, and (2) communicate with the server to support the learning activity. While the recording function and the communication function, which is not determined on current standards, is implemented as a JavaScript and is utilized in the current EPUB 3.0 viewer, ths strategy of proposing such recording and communication functions as the next generation of e-book standard, or special standard (EPUB 3.0 for education) is needed. Future research in this study will implement open source program with the proposed open digital textbook standard and present a new educational services including Big Data analysis.