Knowledge Broker fact-file

What's the Problem?

The key to effective knowledge management lies in accessing the right knowledge at the right time. In the context of today's distributed information organisations this may not be a straightforward task. While a company intranet (and, more generally, the internet) would seem to present an ideal medium for delivering such knowledge 'services', the problem arises of just how these services are to be located in such an decentalised, fluid environment.

Towards a Solution

Some sort of brokering service is commonly proposed as a solution to this problem of locating and using disparate knowledge services in a distributed environment. The Knowledge Broker represents an attempt to provide such a service from an AKT, knowledge-centric persepective. Agents offering services advertise them to the broker, while agents with problems to solve pose queries to the broker; the role of the broker, then, is to match one or more of the available services with these queries, where possible, and to suggest these possibilities to the querying agent.

The AKT broker operates at two complementary levels of abstraction:

• knowledge services are specific 'functions' (or competences) advertised in terms of their preconditions, the roles fulfilled by their inputs and outputs, and, perhaps, particular dependencies on the availability of other, external services (all described in terms of a particular ontology).
• knowledge services are described as more general 'knowledge transformations' of input knowledge into output knowledge.

Describing a broker service (in this case a 'neural network training algorithm' service) in the more abstract form of a knowledge transformation.

When operating at the first of these levels, the broker is able to formulate relatively precise 'chains' of agent interactions (which can often be automated, if the environment allows) to solve precise queries. At the second, more abstract level, the brokered solutions are, as might be expected, more abstract, but which allow progress to be made in situations where precise formulations of queries are, for whatever reason, not possible, or where more general explorations of the space of possible services are wanted.