| Dr. Brock Stitts is the manager of ASI's Knowledge Management Tactical Area. Brock has been conducting knowledge engineering at ASI since 1999 in a variety of domains including unmanned vehicles, intelligence analysis, and video games. He has an M.S. in computer science, a Ph.D. in philosophy (specializing in the philosophy of artificial intelligence), and an M.S. in physics all from Florida State, as well as a B.A. in physics from Rice University. | |
Q: Why do you need knowledge management technology? A: In the Information Age, it is imperative that companies have effective means of managing business information. There are a wide variety of tools to accomplish this, such as databases and spreadsheets. To use this information, however, one must have knowledge. However, knowledge, at this time, is the red-headed stepchild of business as compared to information. How tasks get done is often a matter of "tribal knowledge"; there is no systematic method of representing, collecting, organizing, or analyzing the company's knowledge. If your business or organization relies on tribal knowledge, you are a prime candidate for knowledge management technologies .
Q: What are knowledge management technologies?
A: Knowledge management technologies are used to organize your knowledge so that you can search and reuse it effectively. ASI is developing an organized knowledge tool for knowledge management with the following features: A document annotation tool that is easy to use  | You don't need to be a programmer! | | | You are guided through the annotation process | | | Great for your company experts who don't have time to learn a new software package | | | Has a powerful annotation scheme that builds a knowledge representation "under the hood" | A Search tool | | Uses the knowledge representation that you've built with the document annotation tool | | | Goes beyond keyword search |
Q: When do you use the organized knowledge tool? A: Many businesses need to organize knowledge they currently have, but they can also use knowledge management technologies as they create new business intelligence. In fact, organizing as you go will speed the process of developing new business intelligence.
Q: Who should use the organized knowledge tool?
A: Anyone in your organization can use ASI's organized knowledge tool. It requires no more expertise than, for example, web surfing.
Q: How does the organized knowledge tool work?
A: ASI has almost twenty years of experience building knowledge-based systems. We've learned that it can be a difficult process unless you have the proper tools for the job. That's why we've recognized the need for a tool that can be used without having to manipulate specialized knowledge base syntax, yet has the power knowledge-based systems can give you. Instead of adding keywords to a document, as you do with web pages, the tool asks you questions about the document, interview, paragraph, or whatever kind of entry you want annotate. For example, is the entry about some task you perform? The tool converts your answers to its own internal knowledge representation, and the search tool reasons about this knowledge representation to generate intelligent answers to questions.
Q: What other knowledge management technologies is ASI at work on?
A: ASI is working on a tool to facilitate semantic interoperability of software applications. It is easy enough to define a common syntax, e.g., XML, so that different software applications can pass data and knowledge between them, but a shared syntax is no guarantee that the data and/or knowledge will mean the same thing to each application. BACK TO TOP |
