MEETING THE REQUIREMENTS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Isolated applications of expert system technology have often failed to meet the demands for integrated knowledge management experienced in many organizations. In the KNOWLEDGE-LINKER project an approach is taken, which for a given generic application domain provides support for flexible development of families of related knowledge systems, offering problem solving, advice giving, tutoring, or other kinds of knowledge communication. This paper reports on the basic architecture of the KNOWLEDGE-LINKER develpment environment, in practicular the meta-level support for generating customized tools for direct use by domain experts, and summarizes experiences from development of a number of knowledge systems in a reference domain dealing with biochemical laboratory work. Specific topics addressed include the use of partial plans and explicitly represented negative knowledge for experiment planning as well as for intelligent tutoring based on a coaching approach. The long-term goal of the project is to contribute to the development of computerized environments for effective knowledge management.