Concept-Based Management of Technical Knowledge

Bringing Knowledge to Business Processes

Volume

Papers from the 2000 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Knowledge about technical systems deserves our attention for several reasons. It shapes industry’s core processes which depend on knowledge. It is an asset of great value because it is used by those who engineer, operate or maintain a system. This paper explains key characteristics of technical knowledge, the reason why it is difficult to manage and what we can do about it. Our experiences e.g. with documentation of complex communication systems and extensive use of SGML let us believe that management of technical information should rely more on conceptual structure and semantic markup. This will affect the way we design DTDs and use ontologies.