Experience management. Foundations, development methodology, and internet-based applications. (Q1880563)

Experience management is a special kind of knowledge management. Experience is a specific knowledge that was acquired by a problem-solving agent in a problem-solving situation. Artificial intelligence provides methods for experience representation and experience processing. Case-based reasoning addresses these issues in particular. Web technologies are playing an important role in experience management. In the text the main conceptual questions for experience management are identified and a framework for this management is proposed. A large body of principal methods are analyzed and presented in a unified and concise terminology. The theory is put into industrial practice: three divergent and significant applications are discussed in detail -- electronic commerce, diagnosis of complex technical equipment and electronic design reuse. In the first chapter an introduction is given to all areas that are then studied in detail in the book, and principles of experience characteristics and management are presented. The main text of the book is divided into three parts -- knowledge representation for experience, methods for experience management, applications. In the first part textual case representation is presented with a conversational and structural approach, then formalized approaches are introduced (attribute-value, graphs, predicate logic, hierarchical representation and abstract cases), and finally languages, vocabularies and similarity measures are discussed. The second part is devoted to user interaction models and strategies, experience acquisition and presentation, to experience retrieval (sequential, using kd-trees, sql approximation) and experience adaptation, and to the methodology for experience management developed in the frame of the INRECA II European ESPRIT project. In the third part the three applications mentioned in the introduction are described in detail, examples of commercial systems and software tools are presented. The book is based on the habilitation thesis that the author presented at the University of Kaiserslautern; it ends with extensive bibliography (more than 22 pages) where more than 2 pages consist of references to publications of the author of this book. I think that each reader of this book will meet the wish of the author expressed at the end of the preface -- enjoy reading!