The problem of undocumented knowledge
SIMO S. HÄMÄLÄINEN, student, University of Lapland, Finland
HELEN HEINMAA, student, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
Organisations have huge amounts of undocumented knowledge. They employpeople with different experience and skills, who can keep thingsrunning, but much of the information required for this is only in theirheads. This information is difficult to document, but it's vital tokeeping things running smoothly. Often, when a question arises, it iseven difficult to know whom to ask!To access such information, we propose a social discussion channel builtaround a chat service:1. Users maintain a list of areas of expertise: general topics whichthey know about.2. When someone needs information on a particular topic, she logs ontothe chat and asks her question.3. Using linguistic and semantic analysis, the system processes thequestion and extracts keywords. These keywords are compared withpeople's expertise to find out who may know the answer.4. Messages are sent to the users who may be able to help.5. Someone who knows the answer replies.Unlike business emails which take longer to write, people arecomfortable sending quick, to-the-point replies in a chat. People arealso comfortable ignoring chat messages. Because the questions are sentto many people, anyone who is busy can ignore the question. Lessdistracting than a live chat session, the system is more instantaneousthan email.Many fields could benefit from this system. Experts such as doctors,developers and technical support personnel can share their expertiseefficiently. Informal sharing of information is an efficient way to tapinto the varying areas of expertise and also share information for stafftraining purposes.Questions and answers are stored in a searchable database. New questionscan be compared to previously answered questions and the system cansuggest solutions automatically. As a side product the system createsnew, high-quality documentation automatically.