Systematic Evaluation and Maintenance of Experience Bases

Experience-based continuous learning is essential for improving products, processes, and technologies in any emerging area of business and science. This can be facilitated by repository-based organizational learning through capturing relevant experience for reuse in an experience base. Since for obvious reasons such organizational learning from experience needs to be a permanent endeavor, an organization has to handle a “continuous stream of experience”. Thus, such a base of experience requires maintenance. This should not simply happen ad-hoc, but in a systematic manner. To make competent decisions about maintenance, the experience base and its usage has to be analyzed (i.e., evaluated). To improve maintenance itself, it is necessary to learn about it both from a technical and organizational point of view. For this purpose, we present a flexible, practical maintenance and evaluation framework including all the necessary roles for its organizational implementation that can be combined with other approaches from artificial intelligence, knowledge engineering, and software engineering at different levels of detail.