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Abstract

Many organizations regularly answer questions from their clients. While clients may spend too much time navigating the organization's infrastructure to get answers, the organization's experts often feel overwhelmed because they answer the same questions repeatedly or they receive questions which are irrelevant or marginal to their expertise. As the organization's body of expertise grows and market competition increases, there arises an urgent need to satisfy the clients quickly and use the experts efficiently. To address this need, we developed an approach to building software managers of online free-text expertise, called Information Exchange systems. These systems act as intermediaries between the organization's clients and experts. They provide the clients with access to online expertise through interactive question-answering. They allow the experts to modify the existing expertise and to collaborate on the incoming questions. In this paper, we describe an emerging World Wide Web application, called the Chicago Information Exchange, that manages the online free-text expertise of the University of Chicago's Computer Science Department.



Val Kulyukin
Thu Mar 19 09:57:35 CST 1998