Analysis of difficulties in transferring expert systems technology into the financial industry applications suggests that speed-up of the prototyping phase can significantly reduce the cost and length of the entire development process. We suggest a prototype concept that is generic for certain types of financial applications and can serve as both a catalyst for the knowledge engineering process...

This paper describes the study on workpractices of product development engineers in three large European companies. The methods used to investigate the knowledge management involved in theses processes were interviews and brainstorming sessions using the Group Elicitation Method. In total, 53 engineers, project managers and knowledge management experts participated. The findings from the case s...

This poster aims to visually present the first results of the ongoing research on a cartographic approach to the representation of knowledge in its present configurations by showing some applications of the ‘Knowledge Atlas’, a software tool developed to explore such approach. The concept of ‘atlas’ in this context doesn’t depict as much a list of maps, but rather a system of representations of...

The study is from a base of accident scenarii in rail transport (feedback) in order to develop a tool to share build and sustain knowledge and safety and secondly to exploit the knowledge stored to prevent the reproduction of accidents / incidents. This tool should ultimately lead to the proposal of prevention and protection measures to minimize the risk level of a new transport system and thus...

Product/service family engineering, which encourages the development of a common product platform, plays a key role in facilitating large-scale and planned reuse in the development of customized products. In product family designs, managing points of variability is critical to achieve product variety. Variation points are points at which one among the several possible variations of a feature of...

The articulation of Knowledge Management as an organisational strategy has occurred in the context of a radical shift towards an information based economy. The most significant aspect for organisations operating in the information economy is their ability to utilise the volumes of information that are now readily available without the constraint of media, geography or time. A critical factor fo...

In order to survive, a great number of small companies are forced to offer a wide product variety and often to respond to the market with customised solutions. At the same time, fast delivery is often a key to win orders. As a result, a vital challenge for these companies is to overcome the trade-off between product variety and delivery time, without compromising cost structure. Recent developm...

In this paper we examine some of the ways in which an ontology can be used to assist in the evaluation of knowledge-based systems. Key elements of the support provided by the ontology relate to attempting to give coherence to the domain conceptualisation; making the role of experts in evaluation more structured and less at the mercy of interpretation; constraining the number of test cases requi...