Hybrid KM: Integrating Documents, Knowledge Bases, and the Web

Artificial Intelligence in Knowledge Management

Volume

Papers from the 1997 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Knowledge is a critical resource but we still do not have many new ideas on how to manage it. Most (online) knowledge is currently kept in conventional documents that are hard to structure, classify, browse, search, and even find. Organizations struggle with masses of such documents in hundreds of formats. Classical AI has largely ignored this real and serious problem, and while information retrieval research has tackled some of the problems, it is totally at odds with how AI tries to deal with knowledge problems. Cooperative work systems such as the Web and Lotus Notes are beginning to tackle that aspect. Database systems can contribute much of the required functionality. Hence we seek to integrate functionality and ideas from these sources. This paper describes an attack on the knowledge management problem by introducing a new hybrid notion of document cum knowledge base. We also discuss IKARUS, our experimental testbed.