Article Information

Author:
Eric Beda1

Affiliation:
1Southern African Centre for Infectious Diseases Surveillance, Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania

Correspondence to:
Eric Beda

Postal address:
PO Box 3297, Morogoro, Tanzania

How to cite this poster:
 Beda, E., 2012, ‘Towards One Health Knowledge Networks: A Southern African Centre of Infectious Disease Surveillance case study’, Onderstepoort Journal of Veterinary Research 79(2), Art. #480, 1 page. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/
ojvr.v79i2.480

Note:
Proceedings of the Conference of the Southern African Centre for Infectious Disease Surveillance ‘One Health’ held at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, Johannesburg, July 2011.

Copyright Notice:
© 2012. The Authors. Licensee: AOSIS OpenJournals.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Towards One Health Knowledge Networks: A Southern African Centre of Infectious Disease Surveillance case study
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• Footnote
The dynamic nature of new information and/or knowledge is a big challenge for information systems. Early knowledge management systems focused entirely on technologies for storing, searching and retrieving data; these systems have proved a failure. Juirsica and Mylopoulos1 suggested that in order to build effective technologies for knowledge management, we need to further our understanding of how individuals, groups and organisations use knowledge.

As the focus on knowledge management for organisations and consortia alike is moving towards a keen appreciation of how deeply knowledge is embedded in people’s experiences, there is a general realisation that knowledge cannot be stored or captured digitally. This puts more emphasis in creating enabling environments for interactions that stimulate knowledge sharing.

Our work aims at developing an un-obtrusive intelligent system that glues together effective contemporary and traditional technologies to aid these interactions and manage the information captured. In addition this system will include tools to aid propagating a repository of scientific information relevant to surveillance of infectious diseases to complement knowledge shared and/or acts as a point of reference.

This work is ongoing and based on experiences in developing a knowledge network management system for the Southern African Centre of Infectious Disease Surveillance (SACIDS), A One Health consortium of southern African academic and research institutions involved with infectious diseases of humans and animals in partnership with world-renowned centres of research in industrialised countries.

Footnote

1. Using Ontologies for knowledge management: An information systems perspective, Igor Jurisica, John Mylopoulos, Eric Yu, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.