Abstract
The authors have been working within "Japan SPI Consortium (JASPIC)" towards establishment of a knowledge structure for process improvement. Our objective is to store useful knowledge, to provide mechanisms for its usage, and to encourage creation of new knowledge. During our efforts to extract, categorize and consolidate knowledge from the presentation materials at the “SPI Japan” conferences organized by JASPIC, we saw problems with respect to the formalization of knowledge, especially its coverage. To solve this issue, we devised a knowledge model that consists of seven information elements as a representation of domain specific knowledge, and then introduced a standard template to be used for presentation abstract. As a result, statistically significant change in the distribution of knowledge coverage was observed, and the amount of descriptions increased for items such as causal analysis, verification and validation of process improvement. In terms of improvement for the quality of knowledge, positive feedbacks were obtained from proposal reviewers and conference participants for improved understandability.
