Global case-base development and deployment

Abstract

A major benefit of case-based reasoning (CBR) technology is in the capture and reuse of knowledge to solve problems. Over the past few years, there have been a large number of companies deploying CBR applications in the area of customer support. Since many of these companies are global, there has been increasing interest on building and deploying case bases on a global scale — both to leverage the knowledge and expertise that is distributed around the world, and also to make case bases available to all the regional support organizations to solve customer problems consistently worldwide. These efforts have identified a number of key issues that global companies need to address — issues such as (1) distributed knowledge capture and case authoring, (2) distributing case bases and updates, (3) localization, both for foreign language translation and for incorporating country-specific content, (4) on-going maintenance, and (5) global management and organization. This issues are discussed along with examples of the various approaches companies have taken.