Refereed full papers (journals, book chapters, international conferences)

2002

Human problem solving in many fields is based on extensive experience. A long time ago, business organizations recognized the concrete value of knowledge, but only recently have they started to systematically introduce measures to grow, capture, explore, and maintain their knowledge. The interdisciplinary research field that deals with these issues is called knowledge management. Experience management is a special kind of knowledge management that is limited to the management of experience. Experience is valuable, stored, specific knowledge that was acquired by a problem-solving agent in a problem-solving situation. Today it is recognized that experience covers large portions of the knowledge in an organization that need to be managed and reused in a systematic manner. From the computer science point of view, artificial intelligence provides methods for experience representation and experience processing. Case-based reasoning, which has been an active research and application field for the past 20 years, addresses these issues in particular. With the recently growing importance of knowledge-management applications, the case-based reasoning branch providing appropriate methods is raising increasing attention. At the same time the former frontiers to related areas such as machine learning, information theory, organizational learning, or process modeling have started to vanish. Moreover, Web technologies are playing an important role in experience management. They provide the connectivity that is required to share experiences. Although the Internet is primarily a new medium, it enables the development of new applications implementing services that support humans during different kinds of problem solving