Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Identified as an important management concept five years ago (Gamer 1999), knowledge management (KM) aims to enable organizations to capture, organize, and access their intellectual assets. This paper proposes a prototype system that applies a knowledge management approach to support concept-based multimedia information retrieval by integrating various information analysis and image processing techniques. The proposed system uses geographical information as its testbed and aims to provide flexibility to users in terms of specifying their information needs and to facilitate parallel extraction ofinformation in different formats (i.e., text, image). Our testbed selection is based not only on the fact that geographical information has become an important resource supporting organization decision making, but also on the diversity of its information media and the fuzziness of geo-spatial queries. We hope that the proposed system will improve the accessibility of geographical information in different media and provide an example of integrating various information and multimedia techniques to support concept-based cross-media information retrieval.

Organizations are increasingly utilizing knowledge-sharing technologies to increase the amount of knowledge within their organization. While in most organizations, knowledge sharing is seen as a benefit, for law enforcement agencies it is viewed as a necessity. In order to protect against future terrorist attacks like September 11th, law enforcement agencies are trying to increase knowledge sharing across their current organizational boundaries. Given this massive undertaking, we have to wonder what are the potential unintended effects of this increase in knowledge sharing. This dissertation seeks to address this issue by understanding the relationships between individual and organizational factors, the use of knowledge sharing technology, and organizational outcomes.After a general discussion on knowledge, knowledge management strategies and technologies, a two-part model of knowledge sharing is proposed that 1) predicts outcomes given the use of knowledge sharing technology and 2) investigates the individual and organizational factors that serve as antecedents to the use of the knowledge sharing technology.The findings of this research suggest that given the characteristics of a police organization, an increase in the use of the knowledge sharing technology to communicate with external groups results in decreased productivity and job perceptions. Furthermore, this relationship may be moderated by factors within the police organization. Previous research on knowledge sharing has found that as knowledge sharing increases between individuals in different groups, productivity also increases. The results of this dissertation indicate that this is not always the case. By pulling together different areas of research, such as knowledge management, information technology, communication, and organizational behavior, this dissertation addresses the gaps in the research and contributes to the existing understanding of knowledge sharing. This dissertation also provides an important notice to law enforcement and other organizations: although they may approach knowledge sharing with the best intentions, there can be unintentional effects to increasing the use of knowledge sharing technology.

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