Knowledge Reuse

Society is becoming a great source of knowledge and innovation, the synergy of all the ideas that are coming from all the countries across the world is fostering the rise of a new kind of society where knowledge plays an important role, nevertheless today’s society needs a global strategy to improve knowledge management in order to ensure its accessibility. This paper introduces a global strategy supported on the one hand, by a methodological framework that proposes a transactive memory system to allow encoding, storing, and retrieving knowledge collectively in a smart manner, on the other hand, it is supported by a technological framework based on Web 2.0 technologies aimed to implement the methods and strategies defined in the transactive memory system. Moreover, this global strategy must ensure the maturity of the generated knowledge in order to foster innovation; also knowledge use must be tracked and measured in order to allow knowledge to become intellectual capital,whichis on...

"Product development involves a set of complex problem-solving activities. Their effectiveness depends on how well companies share learnings from one problem-solving experience to another. “Lessons learned (LL) practices” are common knowledge management efforts through which companies attempt to foster experience-based learning environments within them. However, many companies fall short in utilizing LL at an action level, i.e. in capturing and sharing learned lessons, and applying them in new situations is still difficult.

This thesis is largely based upon qualitative data collected in three case studies that had two main objectives. Firstly, to investigate the current state of LL practice in order to identify potential barriers in the light of emerging product development trends. Secondly, to identify ways to improve current practices from both capture and reuse perspectives.

The research work identifies 11 functional requirements for improving LL processes based on the outlined potential barriers in as-is practice. The studies showed that effective LL practice requires a continuous approach with a standard format that should be applicable not only to capture lessons from design projects, but also from manufacturing, use, and maintenance phases, where much of the learning is still tacit in nature and difficult to articulate. From a reuse perspective, current project-specific lessons lack contextual knowledge related to learning—that is, the lessons’ background, root-causes, and applicability—thereby demanding a method to capture LL at a process-based level with a richer context.

Based on this analysis, a methodology has been developed for representing LL in a standardized format together with guidelines, using videos and storytelling as enabling media. This methodology includes a seven-step representation of LL, consisting of: (1) lessons learned statement, (2) working context, (3) task description, (4) “what went wrong” or “what went well”, (5) lessons learned, (6) lessons learned measures, and (7) applicability and delimitations.

Preliminary validation activities revealed that the methodology facilitates the preparation and formulation of concise LL with richer context than traditional text-based formats. The methodology has proved to be beneficial in capturing lessons from skill-oriented activities in a narrative form, by visually displaying defects, problems or improvements in complex products and associated actions in production or maintenance phases, for instance. Thus, a video-based LL captures a single learning point with more specific details and actionable recommendations than traditional project-specific text-based approaches, thereby enabling process-based learning. Moreover, the reuse of video-based LL was found to facilitate the execution of new design tasks by increasing users’ contextual awareness, thus enabling them to select possible solutions and apply them in new design situations relatively quickly. The methodology has potential advantages in leveraging experience-based knowledge and learning in early product development phases to avoid reinventing the wheel, and repeating potentially costly mistakes in all relevant company environments."

The knowledge about software organizations is considerably relevant to software engineers. The use of a common vocabulary for representing the useful knowledge about software organizations involved in software projects is important for several reasons, such as to support knowledge reuse and to allow communication and interoperability between tools. Domain ontologies can be used to define a common vocabulary for sharing and reuse of knowledge about some domain. Foundational ontologies can be used for evaluating and re-designing domain ontologies, giving to these real-world semantics. This paper presents an evaluating of a Software Enterprise Ontology that was reengineered using the Unified Foundation Ontology (UFO) as basis.

Nowadays software systems are essential to the environment of most organizations, and their maintenance is a key point to support business dynamics. Thus, reverse engineering legacy systems for knowledge reuse has become a major concern in software industry. This article, based on a survey about reverse engineering tools, discusses a set of functional and non-functional requirements for an effective tool for reverse engineering, and observes that current tools only partly support these requirements. In addition, we define new requirements, based on our group’s experience and industry feedback, and present the architecture and implementation of LIFT: a Legacy InFormation retrieval Tool, developed based on these demands. Furthermore, we discuss the compliance of LIFT with the defined requirements. Finally, we applied the LIFT in a reverse engineering project of a 210KLOC NATURAL/ADABAS system of a financial institution and analyzed its effectiveness and scalability, comparing data wit...

Wikis are becoming popular knowledge management tools. Analysing knowledge management requirements, we observe that wikis do not fully support structured search and knowledge reuse. We show how Semantic wikis address the requirements and present a general architecture. We introduce our SemperWiki prototype which offers advanced information access and knowledge reuse.

Modelling and simulation is used to support a number of engineering processes including product design, testing and maintenance. However, knowledge management support for modelling and simulation is currently poor. Here we present technological and methodological support for knowledge sharing and reuse in the modelling and simulation domain. The Clockwork approach has three key aspects. First, knowledge management support focuses on key stages and transitions in the design process. Second, rationale is integrated with work activities and engineering models to minimise additional effort on the part of the designer. Third, support is provided for knowledge formalisation and generalisation to increase the value of explicated knowledge. The Clockwork methodology and toolkit have been tested and deployed in two industrial case studies. Preliminary trials suggest that the Clockwork approach effectively supports reuse, expediting the modelling and simulation process.

This paper presents a semi-automatic framework that aims to produce domain concept maps from text and then to derive domain ontologies from these concept maps. This methodology particularly targets the e-learning and AIED (artificial intelligence in education) communities as they need such structures to sustain the production of e-learning resources tailored to learners' needs. This paper details the steps to transform textual resources, particularly textual learning objects (LOs), into domain concept maps and it explains how this abstract structure is transformed into a formal domain ontology. A methodology is also presented to evaluate the results of ontology learning. The paper shows how such structures (domain concept maps and formal ontologies) make it possible to bridge the gap between eLearning and intelligent tutoring systems by providing a common domain model.

The Semantic Web is a vision to simplify and improve knowledge reuse on the Web. It is all set to alter the way humans benefit from the web from active interaction to somewhat passive utilization through the proliferation of software agents and in particular personal assistants that can better function and thrive on the Semantic Web than the conventional web. Agents can parse, understand and reason about information available on Semantic Web pages in an attempt to use it to meet users' needs. Such personal assistants will be driven by rules , axioms and the internal model or profile that the agents have inside them for the user. An intrinsic and important pre-requisite for a personal assistant or rather any agent is to manipulate information available on the Semantic Web in the form of ontologies, axioms, and rules written in various semantic markup languages. In this paper, a model architecture for such a personal assistant dealing with real-world semantic markup is described. ...

This paper describes an approach for reusing engineering design knowledge. Many previous design knowledge reuse systems focus exclusively on geometrical data, which is often not applicable in early design stages. The proposed methodology provides an integrated design knowledge reuse framework, bringing together elements of best practice reuse, design rationale capture and knowledge-based support in a single coherent framework. Best practices are reused through the process model. Rationale is supported by product information, which is retrieved through links to design process tasks. Knowledge-based methods are supported by a common design data model, which serves as a single source of design data to support the design process. By using the design process as the basis for knowledge structuring and retrieval, it serves the dual purpose of design process capture and knowledge reuse: capturing and formalising the rationale that underpins the design process, and providing a framework thro...

Modelling and simulation is used to support a number of engineering processes including product design, testing and maintenance. However, knowledge management support for modelling and simulation is currently poor. Here we present technological and methodological support for knowledge sharing and reuse in the modelling and simulation domain. The Clockwork approach has three key aspects. First, knowledge management support focuses on key stages and transitions in the design process. Second, rationale is integrated with work activities and engineering models to minimise additional effort on the part of the designer. Third, support is provided for knowledge formalisation and generalisation to increase the value of explicated knowledge. The Clockwork methodology and toolkit have been tested and deployed in two industrial case studies. Preliminary trials suggest that the Clockwork approach effectively supports reuse, expediting the modelling and simulation process.

Most organizations desire higher quality, lower cost IS projects. To achieve this goal, many organizations are moving to formal project management and software engineering practices. Two tools used to formalize processes and practices are structured ...