Using conceptual mapping to help retain tribal knowledge

Abstract

Documenting and sharing important information learned in industrial practices can often lead to significant payoffs such as reducing operational cost or improving system performance. This information, often referred to as "tribal knowledge", is widely admitted by professional people to be of great value, and yet has not been systematically archived by most companies. In this paper, we present a conceptual mapping based approach for retaining tribal knowledge. We first demonstrate the theoretical framework for this approach that is applied to developing training modules to improve engineering and technology students troubleshooting skills. A case study of using conceptual mapping to capture domain expertise in controlling and monitoring a simulated grid developed in collaboration with Duke Energy Company is then introduced to show the validity and feasibility of the approach in actual industrial environment.