Techniques for organizational memory information systems

The KnowMore project aims at providing active support to humans working on knowledge-intensive tasks. To this end the knowledge available in the modeled business processes or their incarnations in specific workflows shall be used to improve information handling. We present a representation formalism for knowledge-intensive tasks and the specification of its object-oriented realization. An operational semantics is sketched by specifying the basic functionality of the Knowledge Agent which works on the knowledge intensive task representation. The Knowledge Agent uses a meta-level description of all information sources available in the Organizational Memory. We discuss the main dimensions that such a description scheme must be designed along, namely information content, structure, and context. On top of relational database management systems, we basically realize deductive object- oriented modeling with a comfortable annotation facility. The concrete knowledge descriptions are obtained by configuring the generic formalism with ontologies which describe the required modeling dimensions. To support the access to documents, data, and formal knowledge in an Organizational Memory an integrated domain ontology and thesaurus is proposed which can be constructed semi-automatically by combining document-analysis and knowledge engineering methods. Thereby the costs for up-front knowledge engineering and the need to consult domain experts can be considerably reduced. We present an automatic thesaurus generation tool and show how it can be applied to build and enhance an integrated ontology /thesaurus. A first evaluation shows that the proposed method does indeed facilitate knowledge acquisition and maintenance of an organizational memory

Improving the sales forecast process: lifecycle of a BI application in Piaggio

This thesis describes the lifecycle of a Business Intelligence application for enhancing the sales forecast process in Piaggio Group. In particular, the application expects to formalize, automate, integrate the process in the information system and to enrich the corporate information assets for profitability analysis. Technologies adopted are Sap Solutions, mainly platforms like BPC, BW, and BO. La tesi descrive il ciclo di vita di un'applicazione di Business Intelligence atta a migliorare il processo di sales forecast presso il Gruppo Piaggio. In particolare l'applicazione prevede di formalizzare, automatizzare ed integrare il processo a sistema e migliorare il patrimonio informativo aziendale per fini analitici sulla marginalità di prodotto. Le tecnologie adottate sono soluzioni SAP, in particolare gli ambienti BPC, BW e BO