Knowledge Acquisition for an Organisational Memory System

Decision support systems with a knowledge base containing specijic past decision situations regarding an organisation may be referred to as organisational memory systems. A record of these past decisions is assumed to be beneficial to decision-makers and their organisation. Building such systems involves collecting past decision situations porn a decision-maker. This is analogous to knowledge acquisition where an expert’s knowledge is elicited and modelled. In this paper, knowledge acquisition describes the task of eliciting past decision situations (cases) and their characteristics from an expert decision-maker. The resulting computer system provides case-based organisational memory to support decision-making. The paper proposes a knowledge acquisition method for the development of case-based organisational memory. The method combines a number of techniques and is illustrated by a real-world application.