The manager's assistant. An application of knowledge management

Abstract

The Manager's Assistant project at SDC is a decision aid for administrators of large development projects. It supports queries concerning funding and personnel issues. These queries are resolved either via direct database search or with the aid of a deductive mechanism, called DADM [Kell8l], which mediates database access. The Manager's Assistant is an application of SDC's on-going research in knowledge management [Kell82]. The Knowledge Manager system (KM-1) combines the reasoning engine, DADM, and a searching engine, both realized in specialized environments. DADM is implemented on a Xerox 1100 Lisp Machine and the searching engine consists of a Britton-Lee IDM-500 Database Machine. Through this effort we hope not only to further our understanding of some important issues in the design and implementation of knowledge bases, but also to build a practical and useful tool. This paper describes the knowledge base for the Manager's Assistant, its operating environment and its current modes of interaction.