Notations supporting knowledge acquisition from multiple sources

Sammanfattning: Today many organizations are geographically distributed, and the number of international organizations is increasing. Managing knowledge in a distributed organization may include a knowledge repository. An important aspect of a knowledge repository is the responsibility of maintaining the repository, to ensure that the repository is accessible and up-to-date for all users. Our research question is how to acquire knowledge from multiple sources in distributed organizations. We focus on notations used in knowledge acquisition from multiple sources in distributed organizations. We present two notations that support knowledge acquisition in distributed organizations and evaluate them in two field experiments. The first notation, SGN, was not filtered but visible to the domain experts, whereas the second notation, XML, was filtered but not visible to the domain experts. The knowledge represented by the unfiltered notation was used in the design and implementation of an experimental knowledge-based system executing in a distributed environment. The results indicate that the unfiltered notation selected was understandable, and was a good notation as a draft modeling language in the distributed knowledge acquisition process. The knowledge-based system was evaluated in field experiments during two winter seasons and the results indicate that actions proposed by the system were the same as actions taken by experts in about 50 % of the cases. The filtered notation was presented to the domain experts using a building as a metaphor for the knowledge repository. The virtual building was a peer-to-peer design, using an Intranet to communicate. By joining the building community, domain experts can share their knowledge and are able to communicate with other domain experts in the same room using modalities as audio and video. A difference in our approach compared with earlier work is that the domain experts were able to move inside the knowledge repository. The results indicate that acquiring knowledge, without an intermediary knowledge engineer, from multiple sources to a knowledge repository is facilitated by using the building metaphor. The results also indicate that the building metaphor increases the domain experts´ motivation to contribute to the knowledge repository on a regular basis.