Designing an Electronic Knowledge Book: How Advanced Knowledge Management Methods Can Help Information Modeling

This article presents the design study for the electronic knowledge book, a user-centered hypermedia tool for scientific and technical information retrieval guided by knowledge diagrams. This tool allows users to navigate through knowledge diagrams that describe and map a particular domain. They can pick up elements of browsed diagrams and use them to build a query, and then send it to the information fund related to the domain using a specific form. The tool also takes advantages of the virtual documents approach.

After detailing the origin and purpose of the electronic knowledge book, we present the information access strategy it implies and the particular requirements of this strategy in terms of information modeling. We then propose a design study for this tool and present the prototype built for a unit of the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA).