Knowledge management (KM) may be defined as """"""""the ability to organize and structure knowledge, access it, navigate through it, and adapt it as needed"""""""". This research seeks to develop and refine a """"""""building block"""""""" approach for creation of KM applications to facilitate medical education and decision support, and to evaluate its effectiveness. Potential uses include query, browsing, testing, stimulation, didactic instruction, problem solving, and personal file management. Knowledge is considered to be available in multiple forms, both non-adaptive and adaptive. A challenge is to assemble units of knowledge of the forms pertinent to a particular domain, organize them to support user needs, provide consistent access to them, and facilitate linkage among them. This proposal seeks to build on and extend previous work on architectural issues for KM in two principal ways: (1) To refine and further develop software architectures and methodologies. This research will explore the role of a kernel set of functions to facilitate organization and combination of disparate components in building complex KM applications. If properly designed, such a kernel can provide a consistent set of services for all applications. A prototype kernel architecture for KM applications will be designed and tested. Research issues include methods for decomposition of applications to separate their storage, processing, and presentation components; data base requirements for indexing and composing complex structures from disparate, disjoint data elements; and methods to support multi-user cooperative development. Important goals will be to facilitate functional integration of independently developed units, extensibility, and portability and/or interoperability. (2) To validate and evaluate the architectures and methodologies. This will be done principally via on-going participation in collaborative KM applications, where the kernel architecture developed is applied and experience with its use gained, in order to identify problems, delineate other needed capabilities, and prioritize future developments. In addition, aid will be provided for evaluation activities of the collaborative projects themselves, via development of tools for collecting, summarizing, and analyzing usage data. In conjunction with the above activities, a number of key non-technical issues will be explored, which bear upon the practical impact of the technical developments. These include adoption of guidelines for knowledge module definition and interchange; understanding of user information needs and information seeking behavior; and requirements for supporting, maintaining, updating, and disseminating knowledge bases. The approach to these tasks will be to collect and synthesize experiences, review and analyze those of others, and participate in task forces and workshops aimed at elucidating these issues.
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