Supporting knowledge sharing in environmental scanning

An architecture and a prototype are described that provide the capability of capturing, organizing, and distributing knowledge that may be used by experts in classifying patterns of often qualitative indicators in the business environment. The establishment and application are described of a collection of semiautonomous agents, termed apprentices, that use a combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to do the work of gathering, classifying, and distributing the expertise of knowledge workers engaged in business-environment scanning