Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Perfect Knowledge Base?

Problem
My immediate problem is this - all of my colleagues have their set of know-how on a vast set of topics. How do I apply that onto a problem to derive the solution ? Of course we cannot expect all of them to review or apply their time and effort in each case to solve this, which is not the least practical. In this scenario, I am worried only about the amount of data contained in each minds - not how effectively the data gets applied or utilised. (IQ can wait)

Known solutions
Knowledge Base (KB) - Assuming everyone is able to put down their entire knowledge into a knowledge base, knowledge bases could be the solution to solve the problem. But sadly, KB's of today do not satisfy these since:
a.) There is no way to transfer the entire stuff the brain holds into a central DB from everyone. The best they can do is write articles , best practises and the like, voluntarily.
b.) The various KB's around appear to work on 'keywords' or 'similar problems' and does a full-text search to return the result. This should work for troubleshooting a bug or a known issue or a predefined set of problem with a different set of input, but not applicable for a generic problem in hand.

And in the Mystic World -(AI of the future ) ?
In the mystic world, this would translate to a big brain of some kind which is capable of collecting knowledge from the various human minds in addition to :
a.) holding large amount of data
b.) able to process the data based on the requirement
c.) and finally return the best result.

Would this be ever possible ? Perhaps once the brain is deciphered completely, we should be able to create our dear KB brain. Until then its the standard KBs and lots of meetings & emails. Hmmm.

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