The Road Ahead for Knowledge Management – An AI Perspective |
---|
Payal Prabhu
Assignment 15
Due: April 1st, 2002
I liked the article overall and could not find anything particularly disturbing in it.
The main point of this article was to point out that knowledge management is an essential part of society. By addressing the role played by AI in the whole process of knowledge management: how AI technologies have so-far helped in the process, and subsequently integrating these with non-AI technologies, this article drives home the need for better knowledge management technologies.
Pull technologies should be used only when developers know that the users are proficient enough to know where to "pull" the information from and what kind of information can be "pulled" from the database. Without this information available to the user easily, pull technologies can often fail.
Push technologies can be very handy for users where the system recommends solutions from time-to-time depending on the context of the current job. However, levels of relevancy and levels of intrusiveness have to be very carefully decided upon so that information is not totally useless and not pushed on to the user too aggressively.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana)
This is a good quote to show that people need to learn from their past (as well as from other people's past) so that: mistakes are not repeated, and good answers/ideas are reused. Knowledge management helps keep track of good and bad ideas/solutions so that this learning/remembering the past is made easy.
"Innovation is everywhere; the difficulty is learning from it" (John Seeley Brown)
There can be two aspects to this quote. First, "learning" has to be motivated. Knowledge databases could be built galore but if the users are not willing to refer to the database and learn from it effectively, there is no use for such technologies. Second, consolidating information/knowledge from different experiences can be a problem. Integrating different knowledge bases from varying sites can often be too much of a hassle for people to bother with.