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Knowledge Acquisition (KA) is important throughout systems development for gathering expert domain knowledge that is incorporated into the requirements and design of a system. There are problems ensuring that accurate and useful knowledge is captured initially, refined as needed, and transferred to later development efforts in a usable format. We present a method, called tagging, for addressing these problems without undue burden on the KA practitioners, along with initial studies to examine the feasibility of real-time tagging and to inform the design of a tool called TAGGER. TAGGER operates by permitting KA discussions to be "tagged" as they happen with concepts and groupings relevant to software development.

In software architecture design, we explore design alternatives and make decisions about adoption or rejection of a design from a web of complex and often uncertain information. Different architectural design decisions may lead to systems that satisfy the same set of functional requirements but differ in certain quality attributes. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian Network based approach to rational architectural design. Our Bayesian Network helps software architects record and make design decisions. We can perform both qualitative and quantitative analysis over the Bayesian Network to understand how the design decisions influence system quality attributes, and to reason about rational design decisions. We use the KWIC (Key Word In Context) example to illustrate the principles of our approach.

Due to the strong competition that exists among organisations and the rapid change in the business environment, knowledge has turned out to become a key source for organisations to enhance the competitive advantage. Integrating Knowledge Management (KM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) process is a new research area, therefore, scientific research and literature around it remain limited. In addition, the impact of KM process on customer acquisition, retention, and expansion to improve customer satisfaction remains under study and report. The aim of this paper is to present a conceptual framework of KM integrated with CRM called Customer Knowledge Relationship Management (CKRM) Process depending on analysis of various models presented in KM and CRM. The main highlighting is laid upon the concepts of the concept of customer knowledge (knowledge about customer, knowledge for customer, knowledge from customer). Therefore, this paper contributes to the development of KM process (Knowledge Process about Customer, Knowledge Process for Customer, and Knowledge Process from Customer). The paper investigated how the companies in Jordan developed KM process to improvement the CRM process. Based on data collected from the company, results from analysis indicated that the KM process had a positive effect on CRM process.

Refurbishment can be a complicated process which requires a wide variety of skills from the project team. A knowledgeable project team that is able to understand and interpret client's requirements and rely on their knowledge and experience to meet client's requirements is likely to increase the chance of delivering a project on time and within budget. Very often, a major cause of process delays is the lack of timely, correct information or knowledge, which slows down or halts the work. Until appropriate information or knowledge is acquired for the performance of tasks, there will be a delay and consequent incurrence of costs. This paper illustrates the development of a methodology for the matching of knowledge of the project team with client's project requirements during the refurbishment process. Through the matching process, knowledge gap between the existing knowledge of the project team and the required knowledge is identified and knowledge is captured to fill this gap.

In a knowledge-based economy, it will be crucial to capture expertise and rationale in working environments of all kinds as the need develops to understand how people are working, the intuitive processes they use as they carry out tasks and make decisions and trying to determine the most effective methods and rationales for solving problems. Key outputs from this will be the capability to automate decision making activities and supporting training and learning in competitive business environments. Knowledge capture in knowledge-based economies will also be important in a wide range of sectors from the financial and business domains through to engineering and construction. In traditional expert environments, current manual knowledge capture techniques tend to be time-consuming, turgid and, if applied during an activity, interrupt the "expert" whilst they are carrying out the task. The alternative is to do this after the event, which loses important information about the process due to the individual usually forgetting a great deal of the decisions and alternatives they have used during a task session. With the advent and widespread use of computerized technology within business, this paper contends that new opportunities exist with regard to user logging and subsequent data analysis which mean that there is considerable potential for automating or semi-automating this kind of knowledge capture.

As a case study demonstrating the possibility of attaining automated knowledge capture, this work investigates product design. Within long lifecycle products of all kinds there is a need to capture the engineering rationale, process, information and knowledge created during a design session. Once these data has been captured, in an automated and unobtrusive manner, it must be represented in a fashion which allows it to be easily accessible, understandable, stored and reused at a later date. This can subsequently be used to inform experienced engineers of decisions taken much earlier in the design process or used to train and support inexperienced engineers while they are moving up the learning curve. Having these data available is especially important in long lifecycle projects since many design decisions are made early on in the process and are then required to be understood by engineers a number of years down the line. There is also the likelihood that if an engineer were to leave during the project, any undocumented design knowledge relating to their contribution to the design process will leave with them. This paper describes research on non-intrusively capturing and formalizing product lifecycle knowledge by demonstrating the automated capture of engineering processes through user logging using an immersive virtual reality (VR) system for cable harness design and assembly planning. Furthermore, several industrial collaborators of the project have been visited to determine what their knowledge capture practices are; these findings are also detailed.

Computerized technology and business management systems in the knowledge-based economies of the future will require the capture of expertise as quickly and effectively as possible with minimum overhead to the company along with the formal storage and access to such key data. The application of the techniques and knowledge representations presented in this paper demonstrate the potential for doing this in both engineering and non-engineering domains.