One of the most serious impediments to cost-effective use of knowledge is that often knowledge bases or systems are constructed afresh. It is unusual for problem-solving experience or domain content to be acquired and then reused, partly because knowledge tends to require different representations depending on the problem-solving that it is intended to do. Understanding the use and application of knowledge would enable more leverage to be gained from the knowledge already at hand, thereby increasing the returns on the investment in those knowledge assets.

In knowledge reuse, the aim will be to exploit the software engineering principle of reuse as much as possible. An obvious place to start will be the field of knowledge engineering, in which there are basically three reusable types of object. First, there are ontologies. Second, there are problem-solving methods (PSMs), which describe ways of solving particular problems, and specify the types of knowledge that will be required for the method to work. PSMs are generic objects - hence reusable - and when knowledge of the requisite type is acquired and used by the method, the result is a domain-specific description of the problem-solving in the domain. Thirdly, there is also the possibility of reusing knowledge bases (KBs) themselves, and we shall be looking at ways of adapting existing KBs for use in other contexts.

Of course, not all reusability issues are based around knowledge engineering. For example, it is possible to identify user profiles, such as navigation strategies for getting round a complex website. Reuse of such strategies is very likely to be a valuable extension of our web technologies.

In many cases, reusing knowledge is non-trivial. This counterintuitive result is generally due to two particular problems. First, in an organisation of more than moderate complexity, locating the knowledge to be reused is difficult. Distributed agents may be unaware that the knowledge they need is available; this is the challenge of knowledge retrieval. Secondly, the knowledge may be held in the organisation and correctly identified, but may simply be in the wrong form for the task - the essential information may be only implicit in the repository. The knowledge may have to be reconfigured in some way to meet the requirements of the task in hand. It may be that the knowledge requires some partial modification (e.g. updating). Here, understanding the knowledge requirements of the task is the key to understanding, identifying and using the correct knowledge from the various sources.

AKT Technologies addressing issues in Knowledge Reuse --

• Automatic Support for Enterprise Modelling and Workflow
  Knowledge management using multi-modelling techniques and how modelling activities may be assisted with automation based on formal methods.
  
  
• BuddySpace
  Instant messaging with custom map visualizations, semantics of presence (beyond 'offline'/'online'/'away' status) and value-added web services (group alerts, bots, inferences via personal profiles)
  
  
• Compendium
  Compendium is a semantic, visual hypertext tool for supporting collaborative domain modelling and real time meeting capture
  
  
• ConcepTool
  A system to model, analyse, verify, validate, share, combine, and reuse domain knowledge bases and ontologies, reasoning about their implication.
  
  
• F-Life
  F-Life is a tool for analysing and maintaining life-cycle patterns in ontology development.
  
  
• I-X Process Panels
  The I-X tool suite supports principled collaborations of human and computer agents in the creation or modification of some product.
  
  
• Identify Knowledge Base
  Identify-Knowledge-Base is a tool of Topic Identification about Knowledge Base
  
  
• Internet Reasoning Service
  The Internet Reasoning Service provides a a number of tools which supports the publication, location, composition and execution of heterogeneous web services, specified using semantic web technology
  
  
• KRAFT - I-X TIE
  Supports collaboration among members of a virtual organisation by integrating workflow and communication technology with constraint solving.
  
  
• Knowledge Broker
  The knowledge broker addresses the problem of knowledge service location in distributed environments.
  
  
• Muskrat-II
  Given a set of knowledge bases and problems solvers, the Muskrat system will try to identify which knowledge bases could be combined with which problems solvers to solve a given problem.