Using Case-Based Reasoning for User Modeling in an Experience Management System

Experience-based continuous learning is essential for improving products, processes, and technologies in emerging as well as in established areas of business and engineering science. It can be facilitated by case-based organizational learning, meaning that relevant experience is captured in the form of cases for reuse in a corporate experience repository (case base; experience base; EB). For obvious reasons, learning from experience needs to be a permanent endeavor. Thus, an organization has to handle a “continuous stream of experience.” For this purpose a learning organization, called “Experience Factory” (EF; Basili et al. 1994, Althoff et al. 2000), was established at Fraunhofer IESE, with the COrporate Information Network (COIN) initiative (Althoff et al. 2001). The objectives of COIN are to provide users with valuable information/knowledge at the right time, in an adequate representation, and within the actual context (“justin-time”). In this paper, we first introduce the Experience Management Content Framework of our IESE EF to clarify the given knowledge management context. Enhancing the presented approach, we introduce new strategies to capture, process, disseminate, and exchange knowledge. Case-based reasoning (CBR) is used for both knowledge modeling/retrieval/adaptation as well as for a “learning from example” based approach to user modeling in the sense of Weibelzahl and Weber (1999).