Re: [SAGE] favorite open source knowledgebase?

[Doug Hughes <doug@eng.auburn.edu>]

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, Todd Olson wrote:

> Hi
>
> At 23:39 -0400 2003/04/29, David N. Blank-Edelman wrote:
> >
> >Here's the question: I'm looking for an open source system to provide a
> >self-serve knowledgebase for both my users and my staff. I'm not clear I
> >need a full-blown CMS (or that they are set up to provide all of the
> >following), but I'm open to suggestions from that realm as well.
> >
>
> I head a talk at (I believe) the 1999 YAPC (yet another perl conference)
> by a fellow from a canadian rail company
> that had applied an 'infobot' by Prof Lenzo at CMU
>
> http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~infobot/infobot.html
>
> to this issue, with the result that people would actually, preferentially
> chat with the bot to extract information from the corporate
> databases rather than tray to search them conventionally.
> It was apparently *very* effective in their company.
>
> Unfortunately I can't at this time locate the talk or speaker.
>
> I'd recommend contacting Prof Lenzo  <lenzo@cs.cmu.edu>
> and seeing if he can forward you ...
>
>
> There appears to be more general info about infobots at
>
> http://www.infobot.org/
>

I've done something similar with our infobot (I work in a mostly
work-from-home division of my company, and we are geographically
dispersed around the world). I've extended it so that it's easy
to lookup a voip number through the CCM either by name (first, last,
wildcard), or by number. It sure beats using the phone directory.
It can also pull information from LDAP.

However, I'm not sure this constitutes a knowledge base. It's more
of a conversational query tool. The infobot can also store information
such as X is Y, but it lacks hierarchical information and context in
its vanilla state. It's a good source for storing 'facts', and looking
up information, but doesn't provide much in the way of organizational
framework.
That said, it's handy to have around and we've loaded it with
lots of useful facts like important phone numbers, email addresses,
and other things. The search capbilities are also useful (albeit
primitive)

	Doug