Searchable Answer Generating Environment (SAGE): A Knowledge Management System for Searching Experts in Florida

May 1999

Proceedings of the Twelfth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 1999)

Volume

Proceedings of the Twelfth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 1999)

All Papers

The need to acquire intellectual capital created the Knowledge Management (KM) movement, which aims to develop new practices and tools to capture knowledge. In-depth examination of current KM projects revealed the largest percent of KM projects attempting to create some kind of a knowledge repository. Current studies identify three types of knowledge repositories. One type of knowledge repository attempts to manage organizational knowledge by storing pointers to those who have specific knowledge within the organization. In this light, this paper discusses the development of the Searchable Answer Generating Environment (SAGE) application. The development of this application was funded through the NASA/Florida Minority Institution Entrepreneurial Partnership (FMIEP) grant. The purpose of this application is to create a repository of experts in the State of Florida (FL) State University System (SUS). Currently, each of the State Universities in Florida maintains a database of funded research, but these databases are disjoint and disparate. This application creates one single web-enabled repository, which can be searched in a number of ways including research topic, investigator name, funding agency, or university. The benefits of SAGE are: (1) SAGE is a repository of Intellectual Capital within the state of FL SUS; (2) SAGE helps locate FL SUS researchers for collaboration with industry and federal agencies, thus increasing the potential for research funding to the SUS; (3) SAGE enhances communication and allows more visibility for FL SUS experts, making universities more marketable; and (4) SAGE combines and unifies existing data from multiple sources into one user web-accessible interface. The SAGE system addresses an important KM problem: giving a user access to distributed knowledge, through a web-based Graphical User Interface.