Knowledge Management in Economic Intelligence with Reasoning on Temporal Attributes

People have to make important decisions within a time frame. Hence, it is imperative to employ means or strategy to aid effective decision making. Consequently, Economic Intelligence (EI) has emerged as a field to aid strategic and timely decision making in an organization. In the course of attaining this goal: it is indispensable to be more optimistic towards provision for conservation of intellectual resource invested into the process of decision making. This intellectual resource is nothing else but the knowledge of the actors as well as that of the various processes for effecting decision making. Knowledge has been recognized as a strategic economic resource for enhancing productivity and a key for innovation in any organization or community. Thus, its adequate management with cognizance of its temporal properties is highly indispensable. Temporal properties of knowledge refer to the date and time (known as timestamp) such knowledge is created as well as the duration or interval between related knowledge. We observe that a number of existing systems are concerned much about knowledge resources with less emphasis on its temporal properties. This paper focuses on the needs for a user-centered knowledge management approach as well as exploitation of associated temporal properties. Our perspective of knowledge is with respect to decision-problems projects in EI. The central aim of EI is to obtain tactical and strategic knowledge in order to facilitate timely, cost-effective decision-making process. Thus, the acquisition, representation and storage of knowledge with its temporal properties are required to exploit it for future use. Our hypothesis is that the possibility of reasoning about temporal properties in exploitation of knowledge in EI projects should foster timely decision making through generation of useful inferences from available and reusable knowledge for a new project.