Knowledge management for reuse

Abstract

Managing and reusing knowledge in architecture, engineering and construction firms can lead to greater competitive advantage, improved designs, and more effective management of constructed facilities. We define design knowledge reuse as the reuse of previously designed buildings, building subsystems, or building components, as well as the knowledge and expertise ingrained in these previous designs. This paper introduces the notion of knowledge in context. We argue that in order for knowledge to be reusable, the user should be able to see the context in which this knowledge was originally created and interact with this rich content. We call a repository of such knowledge in context the corporate memory. We describe empirical observations of designers reusing knowledge from their personal design experiences. Based on these observations, we formalize two key activities in the process of knowledge reuse: finding reusable items and understanding these items in context. We formalize six degrees of exploration that lead to understanding. We describe a prototype knowledge management system, CoMem (Corporate Memory), that supports these activities. CoMem is distinguished from the document-centric state-of-practice solutions by its approach of “overview first, zoom and filter, and then details-on-demand.”