Choosing a Knowledge Based System to Support a Help Desk

Help Desks (HD) are units in an organisation that provide support to users of the organisation's products or services. Deployment of Knowledge Based Systems (KBS) might be able to improve the support ooered by HDs In this paper, we compare styles of KBS reasoning and assess their suitability for use to support HDs. In our analysis we recognise two broad types of KBS reasoning: those based primarily on some general, explicit model of the knowledge of the domain (whether that model be expressed by heuristic rules or by a deep model of structure and function), which we term Domain Model-Based Reasoners; and those based primarily on a set of examples of events in the domain which we term Example-Based Reasoners (EBR), of which Case-Based Reasoners are a subset. To assess the suitability of these classes we study a series of requirements which we have identiied that KBSs must fulll if they are to support HD operation, and conclude that EBR systems are more likely to meet those requirements. The analysis draws on our earlier work in BD92].