This book is the first volume of a series of five, in which the editor has included the significant work of several researchers. This volume is intended to present the different applications of knowledge-based systems, as well as different design approaches. It includes 11 contributions covering a wide range of domains, from product design and development to business process modeling and purposes.
Many topics are covered in the book. The first contribution is dedicated to a knowledge support framework for modular platform-based product design and development, using structured genetic algorithms for product representation, and an evolutionary design scheme for product family generation. The second paper is devoted to knowledge management in product innovation. As knowledge management (KM) is a relatively new topic, the paper includes an extensive literature review on the concept of knowledge in the management area, and on the evolving trends towards KM configurations.
The third paper addresses the knowledge-based measurement of enterprise agility. As “agility” is not a well-defined term, frequently having different meanings even in the same organization, one of the key problems of the approach is to provide an adaptive knowledge-based methodology for its measurement. The paper provides several guidelines for the construction of any agility measure, and defines four distinct agility infrastructures, along with the necessary mathematical formulation. The fourth paper is concerned with the “make and buy” decision in manufacturing strategy. As the purchasing function has a strategic importance in any manufacturing organization, it is natural to use knowledge-based systems technology to assist decision making in this area. The authors present the development of such a system.
The fifth contribution is on knowledge acquisition, targeting the Internet. The author proposes an intelligent Internet information system, to collect and extract structured information from Web documents. By obtaining knowledge from pre-processed structured information, the system seeks to make possible the automatic construction of an Internet domain knowledge base. The sixth paper addresses basically the same domain. It presents a knowledge-based approach on comparison chart building from heterogeneous, semi-structured sources (product specification Web pages), using conceptual graphs, knowledge representation, and reasoning formalism to train and describe information extraction wrappers.
The seventh contribution seeks to bring together various concepts used in knowledge management and artificial intelligence, to give an idea of their possible impact in organizations. In particular, the paper identifies the role of intelligent agents and multiagent systems in knowledge management. The eighth chapter discusses methods of building knowledge-based systems in software project management. New possibilities for modeling these systems are indicated, and an example of building a model of a social system is specified.
The ninth paper discusses security technologies intended to guarantee safe business processes in smart organizations. It concentrates on the problem of trust. The tenth paper, “Business Process Modeling and its Applications in the Business Environment,” is mainly a survey of business processes, generalized reference architectures, and modeling methodologies, with a section on knowledge management. The last paper presents a knowledge-based systems technology with applications in image retrieval. The authors propose a new knowledge representation approach, namely, a formalism that allows the definition of composite shape description, and of a companion extensional and compositional semantics.
The volume is heterogeneous, from the thematic point of view, as well as from the structure and formal level of the contributions. Some of the chapters include formalisms, definitions of terms, design procedures for knowledge-based systems, and case studies; others are literature reviews.
This will be a useful resource for people interested in the field of knowledge-based systems, despite the fact that there are no comments from the editors with regard to the content and organization of the book, or about definitions and terms that are not yet standardized. The work will allow the reader to get an idea of the applications and challenges of the field, providing an extensive bibliography, but it does not offer a structured approach to what an intelligent system, or even a knowledge-based one, should be, or should be designed to be.
