Project details

Academics at the University of Passau are evaluating a multimedia system that uses mobile and interactive multimedia applications to support working and learning processes in small and medium-sized enterprises.

Researchers on previous projects developed a multimedia knowledge management system to create, examine and manage interactive instructional videos. These are directly incorporated into in-house and inter-company processes as follows:

• Videos help staff or customers to complete technical or motor activities quickly and accurately.
• Users can use mobile devices to tackle and report problems on site, request information about previously solved issues, and collect proposed solutions from other user groups.
• Content can be further developed and adapted whilst the system is in use via the addition of new content, comments, or changes.
• Content can be viewed on mobile devices anywhere and at any time. The hypervideo medium can therefore be put to a variety of practical uses for knowledge transfer.

Researchers on the mirKUL project are evaluating what has been developed thus far and seeking to provide small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with a cost-effective, multimedia-based system for knowledge transfer. The aim is for it to be tailored to the company’s specific needs and meet legal requirements for data protection and industrial constitution law.

The potential economic applications can be examined via the following three application scenarios:

• As support for operational knowledge management – both externally to customers and within the company itself (business-to-employee and business-to-business)
• For customer-oriented knowledge management (business-to-consumer)
• As a crowdsourcing platform for knowledge transfer on the World Wide Web (consumer-to-consumer)

If successful, this will generate new services and software products that will sustainably increase the effectiveness of knowledge management in SMEs and can be flexibly tailored to the needs of a variety of fields. In summary, companies using the system will be able to improve their workflows and thus their competitiveness.

The system is available as an open-source product called “SIVA Suite”.