The problem of maintaining a knowledge base is substantially concerned with keeping track of rules that share common wisdom. A knowledge representation is described in which a collection of rules that are based on common wisdom are represented as a single ‘item’. For items, maintenance hazards, caused by one item being partially hidden within another, still remain. ‘Objects’ are introduced as i...

Knowledge ‘decay’ is a measure of the degradation of knowledge integrity. In a unified knowledge representation, data, information and knowledge are all represented in a single formalism as “items”. A unified knowledge representation is extended here to include two measures of knowledge integrity. A rule of inference is defined on the unified knowledge representation that preserves the validity...

Reports results of research into the relationship between effective information systems and business performance. The project involved a case study of 12 companies, selected as being `high performing’ according to specified criteria (profitability, productivity, quality, peer evaluation, and export success) and an interview and questionnaire survey technique which investigated: use of informati...

this paper reports a survey and case study research outcomes on the application of data envelopment analysis (dea) to the ranking method of european foundation for quality management (efqm) business excellence model in iran’s automotive industry and improving benchmarking process after assessment. following the global trend, the iranian industry leaders have introduced the efqm practice to thei...

The knowledge base of companies is increasingly seen as underlying a firm’s performance, and the role of knowledge workers within this framework is seen as strongly associated with a firm’s competitive performance. This perspective views the effective management of knowledge workers as crucial in sustaining an organisation’s competitive advantage. The paper views the financial industry as a kno...

We develop a new methodology and tool for knowledge acquisition under uncertainty. A new knowledge representation called Bayesian Knowledge Bases provides a powerful key to our approach and is well-grounded in probability theory. In this paper, we demonstrate the ease and flexibility with which knowledge acquisition can be accomplished while ensuring the consistency of the knowledge base as dat...