1. Introduction

Abstract

Business organizations have started to give more attention to their knowledge; they are looking for ways to grow, capture, explore, and maintain their knowledge. This is what is called knowledge management. Experience management is a special kind of knowledge management that is restricted to the management of experience knowledge, i.e., specific knowledge situated in a particular problem solving context. Experience management deals with collecting, modeling, storing, reusing, evaluating, and maintaining experience. For experience management, Web technologies for the Inter- and Intranet play an important role. They provide the connectivity that is required to share experience.

This chapter motivates this work and gives a first introduction to experience reuse and management. The three application areas addressed in this book are briefly characterized. Each of them requires Internet or Intranet-based approach to experience management. This chapter ends with an outline of this book, which provides further guidance for the reader.