Knowledge Management for Interactive Software Information Systems
01 January 1992
Software Information Systems (SIS's) represent and provide access to software knowledge for interactive applications such as software understanding, reverse engineering, and code retrieval. The management of software knowledge for SIS's is different depending on the purpose of the system, but some commonalities apply. In particular, managing software knowledge for SIS should address four issues. Representation of knowledge using a formal knowledge representation is a characteristic of SIS's and the choice of representation can be critical for knowledge management. Acquisition of knowledge concerns how knowledge is acquired from human experts, documents, or software artifacts. Access to knowledge involves the human/computer interface: both the mechanism for requesting information from the system and the form of the answer. Finally, maintenance is a critical knowledge management issue: just as software changes, software knowledge must also evolve if it is to be useful. This paper explores these issues in the context of three Software Information Systems built at AT&T Bell Laboratories.