The Infolayer – A Simple Knowledge Management System Put to Use in Academia

In spite of the growing number of KMS emanating from academia, only few of these systems seem to be actively used by their creators. We can only speculate about the reasons, but a lack of usability and support for real-life business processes is likely to be one of them. This paper presents the Infolayer, a KMS developed at the Artificial Intelligence unit at Dortmund university. Originally developed as an integrated information infrastructure for human users and software agents within a specific project, it has grown into a general KMS solution. Where other systems are built around complex reasoning capabilities based on description logics, the Infolayer’s focus is ease of use, customizability and integration of industry standards like UML. The system is being actively used to drive the intranet/internet presence of our unit as well as a number of