A Distributed Intelligence Paradigm
for Knowledge Management¹

M. Bonifacio¹ - P. Bouquet² - A. Manzardo²

¹Knowledge Services Group
Arthur Andersen Business Consulting
matteo.bonifacio@it.arthurandersen.com

² Department of Computer and Management Sciences
University of Trento
{bouquet,manzardo}@cs.unitn.it

Abstract:

In the last ten years, knowledge management (KM) has become a new fashioned managerial practice. Though KM theories seem to benefit from a ``contamination'' with cognitive and social sciences, which emphasize a subjective, contextual, and distributed approach to knowledge representation and integration, current technologies support what we may call a ``god's eye'' paradigm, in which knowledge is viewed as an objective resource. In this paper we discuss artificial intelligence theories and technologies that can support a shift to a new paradigm, called the ``distributed intelligence'' paradigm, in designing KM systems. Using the evolution of KM systems within Arthur Andersen Consulting as a motivating case study, we propose the framework of MultiContext Systems as a specification language for distributed intelligence KM systems, and sketch an agent-based architecture as an example of a KM system which embodies the assumptions of the distributed intelligence paradigm.