FISH: Flexible information sharing and handling system

TLDR: Using FISH, it is made possible to store the knowhow and share the use in the distributed environment and the result of the one-year operation experiment of the system in the office of the authors is presented, together with discussions.

Abstract: With the progress of network technology and workstation technology as the background, there has been progress in the exchange/transmission of information as well as document sharing by electronic means in the office environment. At present, however, techniques have not been developed to the stage where such fragmented information as knowhow is stored/retrieved/managed in the distributed environment. From such a viewpoint, the authors have constructed the knowhow storage system FISH (flexible information sharing and handling system), which can store the knowhow in the text format. In FISH, the minimum unit decomposition of the information and the flexible structurization are realized by decomposing the knowhow into multiple virtual cards to be stored in the computer. Knowhow, which is difficult to be given a systematic structure, is managed by automatically providing links among the card based on the keywords attached to the individual cards. This paper describes first the management method for the knowhow which is the basic design of FISH. Then the features, the functions that can be used, and the implementation of the system are discussed. The result of the one-year operation experiment of the system in the office of the authors is presented, together with discussions. Using FISH, it is made possible to store the knowhow and share the use in the distributed environment.