A Knowledge Management Initiative by UK Local Government

Abstract

This paper describes a knowledge management (KM) project operating within UK local government. Called the INFOSHOP this is a unique collaboration between UK central and local government agencies to establish a knowledge management culture. INFOSHOP provides a distributed and flexible organisational memory for local government regulations. In particular the system helps non-technical front-line reception staff handle complex enquiries on a wide range of government regulations. The paper describes the legislative background to the project as well as the knowledge engineering and the knowledge level modelling undertaken for the project. The paper describes the design, implementation and architecture of the resulting distributed system that supports local customisation of the organisational memory in a controlled and managed process. INFOSHOP’s memory can be considered a case-based reasoning (CBR) system that uses derivational replay to solve problems rather than the more common retrieval of problem-solution pairs.