Developing knowledge management systems with an active expert methodology

de Kristian Sandahl

Abstract: "Knowledge Management, understood as the ability to store, distribute and utilize human knowledge in an organization, is the subject of this dissertation. In particular we have studied the design of methods and supporting software for this process. Detailed and systematic description of the design and development processes of three case-study implementations of Knowledge Management software are provided. The outcome of the projects is explained in terms of an Active Expert development methodology, which is centered around support for a domain expert to take a substantial responsibility for the design and maintenance of a Knowledge Management system in a given area of application. Based on the experiences from the case studies and the resulting methodology, an environment for automatically supporting Knowledge Management was designed in the Knowledge-Linker research project. The vital part of this architecture is a knowledge acquisition tool, used directly by the experts in creating and maintaining a knowledge base. An elaborated version of the Active Expert development methodology was then formulated as the result of applying the Knowledge-Linker approach in a fourth case study. This version of the methodology is also accounted for and evaluated together with the supporting Knowledge-Linker architecture."