From desktop operations to lessons learned

This paper concerns a multi-agent system for knowledge management (KM) for research and development (R&D) projects. R&D teams have no time to organize project information nor to articulate the rationale behind the actions that generate the information. Our aim is to provide a system for helping the team members to make knowledge explicit and to allow them to share their experiences, i.e., lessons learned (LL), without asking them too much extra-work. The paper focuses on how we intend to help the team members to feed the system with LL, using the operations they perform on desktop computers, and how we intend to exploit the LL by using a case-based reasoning engine. We have been developing a prototype of such a KM system for a cooperative project. Early results are presented.