The major outcomes of On-To-Knowledge are a methodology,
tools, and best-practises for knowledge management:
The original project was aimed to deliver methodology, tools, and case studies. During the work on the project it became clear that the applicability of the tools developed would benefit from a system integration architecture designed and developed to allow easy building of real-world solutions based on the developed methodology. Also it was realised that many new applications become possible if the set of the tools get extended with specific inference services. The extension of the project aims to satisfy these needs:
The tool and method environment developed in On-To-Knowledge will
significantly lower the threshold for companies to achieve the knowledge management
demands successfully. It will significantly improve the access to exisiting information
and knowledge and will reduce the costs in acquiring and maintaining this knowledge. Textual and semiformal information be accessed with user-friendly
interfaces and automatic search agents that free the user from large search and retrieval
effort. Automatic support in generating and maintaining docuements enables information
provider to ensure consistency and correctness of their information sources. However, in addition to its generic technology On-To-Knowledge will
develop we deal with three case studies covering a broad range of relevant application
scenarious. Within one partner, a large number of office-workers apply company
procedures and regulations to process claims made by customers. The starting point will be
two already existing information systems for supporting such office work. Currently, this
system is very bothersome and error-prone to maintain. The case study aims at providing a
solution to this problem. In particular, we aim at obtaining a smooth integration of
weakly structured knowledge with formally represented knowledge and integration of the
information system with other knowledge descriptions already existing in the company. This helps to fulfil precisely the information needs that are required in
the different steps and processes of the workflow of an organisation. Providing customers with appropriate information on products and services
decides about the ability of a company to establish successful and stable relationships
with their clients. However, running call centres and providing the help desk personal
with appropriate information is a costly activity. We will develop a solution for one of our partner who has a number of
call-centres, where large volumes of rapidly changing information from very disparate
sources is used by operators to answer customer queries. This information is crucial to
the call centre's productivity, but is currently not efficiently managed, distributed,
accessed and maintained. The penetration of internet and intranet technology enables new types of
organizations. An enterprise is no longer required to rely on a shared and common space in
a geographical sense. Instead, it may be arbitrarily distributed over different regions
and countries. An enterprise-wide network (intranet) establishes its unity. Still, it
introduces high demands on its information and knowledge management capabilities via this
network. Successfully solving the knowledge management demands of such an
organization type decides heavily about success and failure of such enterprises. Many
problems, that can be solved by informal information flows in companies sharing the same
geographical location must here be modelled explicitly and solved technologically. Therefore, On-To-Knowledge tackle with one of the key problems of an
organization type that will soon become increasingly important and wide-spreat in the
future. For Inputs and Outputs see image below (click to enlarge).
Summary |
