Knowledge Management

In the upcoming era of Information Superiority, understanding a user's information needs, within context, will be crucial to efficient and effective collection, production, and retrieval of the information from varied sources. This marks a distinct contrast from today's stovepipe information communities where the users' needs must be transformed to each stovepipe's disparate processes, interfaces, and tools.

KBSim has performed research to extend the notion of knowledge management to "understand the information consumer's mission needs" by codifying the users' stated needs into a structure that reflects the mission, environment, doctrine, and situation. In this way, the user may interact in his own short-form vernacular, knowing that his context will be packaged together with his need statement for consideration downstream. It is envisioned over time that the user will simply ask for what he wants using next generation input devices and applications, with his local information policy automatically embedded in each transaction.

KBSim understands that the progression from information to knowledge management creates a new dimension of challenges in tuning and filtering knowledge (information associations and inferences) to fit the context of the consumer. Providing knowledge to an information consumer without tailoring it to his context presents a wide-range of negative possibilities, from inundating the consumer with useless information to false alert triggering.