Effective Knowledge Navigation for Problem Solving Using Heterogeneous Content Types

Over the past few years many companies have begun emphasizing and implementing processes to capture and share knowledge within their organizations [Davenport & Prusak, 1997; Edvinsson & Malone, 1997; Stewart, 1997]. Corporate infrastructures are being developed to facilitate knowledge creation and reuse, and a variety of software tools are currently available to support the knowledge management (creation, storage, maintenance and retrieval) process. The main goal of these efforts is to shorten and improve the problem solving process by providing access to relevant knowledge. Businesses want to build knowledge management systems to solve some of these important problems: ̄ "How do I do X?" ̄ "Has X been done before? If so, how?" ̄ "What did we do to handle this problem the last time something like it happened?"