A Case-Based Approach to Knowledge Management

Contents

What distinguishes the World Bank from commercial banks and bilateral aid agencies is its wealth of development knowledge gained through economic and social development projects in the world. However, notwithstanding the efforts of the knowledge centers in consolidating information from the staff, much of the available development information is currently scattered across numerous documents and reports. To retrieve a desired piece of information, the current Knowledge Management System provides users with a powerful Web-based full-text search engine that allows them to perform a key-word search. A problem with the key-word search is that the users should be able to articulate exactly what they want. In addition, as the amount of available information increases, the searches would invariably lead to retrieval of more and more documents and one may need to perform many searches. This paper outlines a case-based approach to enhance the current system and raise its operational impact. This approach establishes a unified framework to represent the development knowledge and provides a better search and browsing mechanism to retrieve relevant and useful information.