Knowledge Management &
Specialized Information Systems
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Knowledge Management Systems
Knowledge: Awareness and understanding of a
set of information and the ways in which
information can be made useful to support a
specific task or reach a decision.
Knowledge management system uses an
organization’s knowledge and experience.
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Overview of Knowledge Management Systems
• Increase profits and reduce costs.
• Stores and processes knowledge.
• Explicit knowledge: objective, measurable, can be
documented in reports, papers and rules.
• Tacit knowledge: hard to measure and document.
• Creation of knowledge:
– One individual learns directly from another individual.
– Two pieces of explicit knowledge is combined.
– Expert writes a book teaching others.
– When someone reads a book.
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Obtaining, storing, sharing and using knowledge
• Knowledge workers create, use and
disseminate knowledge.
• Chief knowledge officer (CKO) helps
organizations work with a KMS to create,
store, and use knowledge to achieve
organizational goals.
• After knowledge has been created it is stored
in a knowledge repository.
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Technology to Support Knowledge Management
• ERP tools example SAP
• Groupware
• Lotus Notes. Figure 7.1
• Domino
• MS Sharepoint
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Artificial Intelligence = AI
Systems and Machines that demonstrate the characteristics of intelligence.
Characteristics of intelligent behavior:
– Learn from experience and apply the knowledge acquired from
experience.
– Handle complex situations.
– Solve problems when important information is missing.
– Determine what is important.
– React quickly and correctly to a new situation.
– Understand visual images :: Perceptive system
– Process and manipulate symbols.
– Be creative and imaginative.
– Use heuristics.
– Table 7.1 p256
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The major branches of Artificial Intelligence
• Expert systems:
– Stores knowledge and makes inferences similar to a human expert.
• Robotics:
– Mechanical or computer devices that performs tasks that require a high
degree of precision or that are tedious or hazardous to humans.
– Figure 7.6
• Vision systems:
– Allows computers to capture, store and manipulate visual images.
– Figure 7.5
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The major branches of Artificial Intelligence
• Natural Language Processing and Voice Recognition.
– Natural Language Processing: allows computers to react to statements
made in a natural language such as English.
– Voice recognition: Converting sound waves into words.
• Learning systems.
– Allows a computer to change how it functions based on feedback it
receives.
• Neural networks.
– System that attempts to simulate the functioning of a human
brain.
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Other branches of Artificial Intelligence
• Genetic algorithm
– An approach to solving large, complex problems in which a
number of related operations or models change and
evolve until the best one emerges.
• Intelligent agent
– Programs and a knowledge base used to perform a specific
task for a person, a process, or another program; also
called intelligent robot or bot.
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Expert Systems
• Outputs a recommendation based on answers
given to it by users.
• Intention: capture the expert’s knowledge and
make it available to those who lack the
knowledge.
• Use heuristics, or rules of thumb to arrive at
conclusions or make suggestions.
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Develop an Expert Systems if it can:
• Provide a high potential payoff or reduce risk.
• Capture and preserve irreplaceable human
expertise.
• Solve a problem that is not easily solved using
traditional programming techniques.
• Develop a system which is more consistent
than human experts.
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Develop an Expert Systems if it can:
• Provide expertise needed at a number of
locations at the same time or in a hostile
environment that is dangerous to human health.
• Provide expertise that is expensive or rare.
• Develop a solution faster than human experts
can.
• Provide expertise needed for training and
development to share the wisdom and
experience of human experts with many people.
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Components of Expert Systems
• The Knowledge base
– Stores all relevant information, data, rules, cases, and relationships
that the expert system uses.
– Assembling human experts, Fuzzy logic, Rules & Cases
• The inference engine
– Seeks information and relationships from the knowledge base and
provides answers, predictions, and suggestions the way a human
expert world.
– Backward & forward chaining
• The explanation facility
– Allows a user or decision maker to understand how the expert
system arrived at certain conclusions or results.
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Components of Expert Systems
• The knowledge acquisition facility
– Part of the expert system that provides convenient and
efficient means of capturing and storing all the
components of the knowledge base.
• The user interface
– Makes it easy for users and decision makers to develop
and use.
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Expert Systems Development
• Requires a systematic development approach.
• Determine requirements.
• Identify domain experts.
• Construct the components of the system.
• Implement the result.
• Maintain and review the system.
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Participants in Developing and Using Expert Systems
• Domain: The area of knowledge addressed by the
expert system.
• Domain expert: Has the expertise or knowledge
one is trying to capture.
• Knowledge engineer: Has training or experience
in the design, development, implementation, and
maintenance of an expert system.
• Knowledge user: The person or group who uses
and benefits from the expert system.
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Expert Systems Development Tools and Techniques
• Can theoretically be developed using any
programming language.
• COBOL, FORTRAN, LISP, PROLOG.
• Expert system shell: Collection of software
packages and tools used to design, develop,
implement and maintain expert systems.
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Virtual Reality
• Enables one or more users to move and react in a computer-
simulated environment.
• Through immersion, the user can gain a deeper understanding
of the virtual world’s behavior and functionality.
• Virtual reality simulations require special interface devices
that transmit the sights, sounds, and sensations of the
simulated world to the user.
• Augmented reality: The combination of computer generated
data with stimuli from the real world.
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Interface Devices
• Head-mounted display (HMD)
• Large screens.
• Stereo glasses.
• Speakers.
• Gloves for
haptic interfaces.
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Forms of Virtual Reality
• Fully Immersive
• Not fully immersive –
mouse controlled
navigation through a
three-dimensional
environment.
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Virtual Reality Applications
• Hundreds of applications
• Gesture Technology
• E.g zooming in when pointing at the picture
with your finger
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