Expert system and Lotus Notes applications for retrieval of problem-solving knowledge and information

In 1995 NCR Services began a large scale deployment of two information management technologies that are primarily aimed at sharing problem-solving knowledge in the service environment. We first describe the features of Lotus Notes that are important to us in the computer service business. We then describe the limitations and problems of the hierarchical approaches used in Lotus Notes for retrieval of problem/solution knowledge. The discussion on the case-based retrieval (CBR) application focuses on how we overcame the problems. The balance of the paper expands on the definitions of, and relationships between data, information and knowledge.