Managing Knowledge for Organization-Wide Ad Hoc Committees

Organization and industry-wide ad hoc committees are often formed to develop solutions to crises that are ill-defined. Knowledge available to such committees is at best scattered and possibly nonexistent within the organization. The present work describes an environment created to provide the committee members with the tools to collect, organize, and utilize the knowledge for them to complete their task. The environment makes use of topic maps as the knowledge structure. A distributed system has been implemented to support the proposed environment and demonstrate feasibility.