Mapping and Usage of Know-How Contributions

Mapping know-how, which is knowledge of how to achieve specific goals, is important as the creation pace and amount of knowledge is tremendously increasing. Thus, such knowledge needs to be managed to better understand tradeoffs among solutions and identify knowledge gaps. Drawing from goal-oriented requirements engineering, in this paper we propose a specialized (and light weight) use of concept maps to map out contributions to problem-solving knowledge in specific domains. In particular, we leverage on the means-end relationship which plays a major role in such domains and further extend it to be able to depict alternatives and tradeoffs among possible solutions. We illustrate the approach using problems and solutions drawn from two domains and discuss the usefulness and usability of the know-how maps. The proposed mapping approach allows for a condensed representation of the knowledge within a domain including the contributions made and the open challenges.