Managing, Mapping, and Manipulating Conceptual Knowledge

Contents

Effective knowledge management maintains the knowledge assets of an organization by identifying and capturing useful information in a usable form, and by supporting refinement and reuse of that information in service of the organization’s goals. A particularly important asset is the "internal" knowledge embodied in the experiences of task experts that may be lost with shifts in projects and personnel. Concept Mapping provides a framework for making this internal knowledge explicit in a visual form that can easily be examined and shared. However, it does not address how relevant concept maps can be retrieved or adapted to new problems. CBR is playing an increasing role in knowledge retrieval and reuse for corporate memories, and its capabilities are appealing to augment the concept mapping process. This paper describes ongoing research on a combined CBR/CMap framework for managing aerospace design knowledge. Its approach emphasizes interactive capture, access, and application of knowledge representing different experts’ perspectives, and unobtrusive learning as knowledge is reused.