An Infrastructure for Managing Knowledge Using Intelligent Workflow

Today’s business environment is characterized as knowledge being the critical resource for any business activity. By automating many of their routine business processes, companies are able to save time and valuable human resources. Workflow management systems can serve as the basis for collaborative computing, as evidenced by their growing popularity. This paper describes current research efforts to develop a collaborative computing environment, Postdoc-Next Generation (NG). The development of Postdoc-NG is based on Postdoc©1, a document management system developed at NASA-Ames Research Center, and currently used throughout NASA. This effort requires the redesign of the current Postdoc architecture with a focus on knowledge management (KM), including the handling metadata, supporting workflow application logic, and an object oriented architecture to facilitate user-managed data collection.