There is growing evidence that knowledge co-creation and interactivity during learning interventions aid knowledge acquisition and knowledge transfer. However, learners have mostly been passive consumers and not co-creators of the knowledge visualisation aids created by teachers and instructional designers. As such, knowledge visualisation has been underutilised for allowing learners to construct, demonstrate and share what they have learned. The dearth of appropriate guidelines for the use of knowledge visualisation for teaching and learning is an obstacle to using knowledge visualisation in teaching and learning. This provides a rationale for this study, which aims to investigate usability-based knowledge visualisation guidelines for teaching and learning. The application context is that of Science teaching for high school learners in the Gauteng province of South Africa. Following a design-based research methodology, an artefact of usability-based knowledge visualisation guidelines was created. The artefact was evaluated by testing learners’ conformity to the visualisation guidelines. Qualitative and quantitative data was captured using questionnaires, interviews and observations. The findings indicate that the guidelines considered in this study had various degrees of impact on the visualisations produced by learners. While some made noticeable impact, for others it could be considered negligible. Within the context of high school learning, these results justify the prioritisation of usability-based knowledge visualisation guidelines. Integrating Human Computer Interaction usability principles and knowledge visualisation guidelines to create usability-based knowledge visualisation guidelines provide a novel theoretical contribution upon which scientific knowledge visualisation can be expanded. / School of Computing / M. Sc. (Computing)

The main objective of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is to advance and ensure better manufacturing efficiency, productivity, and flexibility through the smart use of emergent technologies to enable the development of digital tools to visualise crucial information regarding factory events, products, and processes. As these systems grow in complexity, more information will be necessary to learn how to use them, and thus, more expertise and knowledge will be required to handle them. This study was therefore conducted with the aim to investigate the affordances and limitations of incorporating knowledge management and knowledge visualisation into a downtime management tool at a manufacturing company. This study has gathered findings from users through user interviews and contextual inquiries to provide insights and experiences on the existing downtime management tool. Thereafter, a first iteration of a prototype was designed and evaluated through a heuristic evaluation to investigate the applicability of knowledge management and visualisation concepts in the tool. A second design iteration was then developed to be evaluated with 10 users. This study resulted in overall positive attitudes towards knowledge sharing and user ownership concerning the knowledge-enhanced downtime management tool. Therefore, there are affordances of utilising knowledge management and visualisation to increase knowledge sharing between peers, it can help them in making more informed decisions, and the tool can support both new and experienced users when categorising downtime issues. However, it is essential to take into consideration the time and effort to maintain such a system, and to investigate the long-term effects of incorporating such concepts into different I4.0 tools. / Huvudsyftet med Industri 4.0 (I4.0) är att främja och säkerställa bättre effektivitet, produktivitet och flexibilitet i produktion genom smart användning av ny teknik för att möjliggöra utveckling av digitala verktyg för att visualisera viktig information om händelser, produkter och processer i fabriken. I takt med att dessa system blir alltmer komplexa kommer det att krävas mer information för att lära sig att använda dem, och därmed kommer det att krävas mer expertis och kunskap för att hantera dem. Den här studien genomfördes därför i syfte att undersöka vilka möjligheter och begränsningar det finns att använda kunskapshantering och kunskapsvisualisering i ett verktyg för hantering av stilleståndstider på ett tillverkningsföretag. Denna studie har samlat in resultat från användare genom användarintervjuer och kontextuella undersökningar för att ge insikter och erfarenheter om det befintliga verktyget för hantering av stilleståndstider. Därefter utformades och utvärderades en första iteration av en prototyp genom en heuristisk utvärdering för att undersöka tillämpligheten av kunskapshantering och visualiseringskoncept i verktyget. Därefter utvecklades en andra design-iteration som utvärderades med 10 användare. Denna studie resulterade i övergripande positiva attityder till kunskapsdelning och användarnas ägarskap när det gäller det kunskapsförstärkta verktyget för hantering av stilleståndstider. Därför finns det möjligheter att använda kunskapshantering och visualisering för att öka kunskapsutbytet mellan kollegor, det kan hjälpa dem att ta mer välgrundade beslut, och verktyget kan stödja både nya och erfarna användare när de kategoriserar stilleståndsfrågor. Det är dock viktigt att ta hänsyn till den tid och de ansträngningar som krävs för att underhålla ett sådant system samt att undersöka de långsiktiga effekterna av att införliva sådana koncept i olika I4.0-verktyg.

During an incident, which is critical in nature, sense-making by the individuals involved are essential in ensuring an optimal response to the incident. The incident management systems employed to manage the allocation of resources to an incident allow for the visualisation of the incident and its constituents, and this visualisation supports sense-making by improving knowledge transfer. Knowledge visualisation contains pitfalls that can be avoided by implementing knowledge visualisation criteria. The purpose of this study is to identify the knowledge visualisation criteria that optimise the knowledge transfer by visual artifacts in incident management systems like emergency medical or fire-response systems. This study used the design science research (DSR) methodology and was conducted in the context of critical incident response management. A review of the existing literature was done to identify an initial set of knowledge visualisation criteria. The initial set was evaluated by content experts (using questionnaire driven interviews) and usability experts (using questionnaire driven interviews, usability testing with eye tracking and a survey) in the context of an emergency incident management system. The main contribution of this study is a validated set of knowledge visualisation criteria to guide knowledge transfer in incident management systems. / School of Computing / M. Sc. Computing

A large amount of information is contained in textual records, which originate from a variety of sources such as handwritten records and digital media like audio and video files. The information contained in these records is unstructured and to visualise the content of the records is not a trivialtask.In order to visualise information contained in unstructured textual records, the information must be extracted from the records and transformed into a structured format. This research aimed to visualise the coherence of facts contained in textual sources in order to allow the user who make use of the visualisation to make an assumption about the validity of the textual records as a set. For the purpose of the study, it was contemplated that the coherence of facts contained in a document set was indicated by the multiple occurrences of the same fact over several documents in the set. The output of this research is a model that abstracts the process required to transform information contained in unstructured textual records into a structured format and the visual representation of the multiple occurrences of facts in order to support the process of making an assumption about the coherence of facts in the set. This assumption enables the user to make a decision.based on the coherence theory of truth.about the validity of the document set. The modelprovides guidance and practices for performing tasks on similar textualdocument sets containing secondary data. The development of the model was informed by a phased construction of three specific software solution instantiations.namely an initial information extraction, an intermediate visual representation and a final information visualisation instantiation. The final solution instantiation was demonstrated to research participants and was evaluated as well. A pragmatic design science research approach was followed in order to solve the research problem. In conducting the research an adaption of the Peffers et at. (2006) design research process model was followed. The result of the research is a model for the visual representation of the coherence of facts in a textual document set. Expert review of the model is added through a process of peer review and academic scrutiny by means of conference papers and a journal article. It is envisaged that the results of the research can be applied to a number of research fields such as Indigenous Knowledge, History and Law. / School of Computing / M. Sc. (Computing)