Knowledge is recognised as a firm's most valuable asset. Understanding how to  identify, collect, classify and process the knowledge within and between  organisations is big business today, primarily for the consulting companies employed by major corporations seeking to capitalise on this most valuable asset. Major hurdles face those organisations embarking on a knowledge management programme. For example, encouraging employees to "part" with their knowledge; effectively using the acquired knowledge to improve aspects of the organisational processes; measuring and managing the impact of knowledge  management. By integrating leading edge and innovative knowledge engineering  techniques to support knowledge management, RIMSAT will provide a novel way of using the acquired knowledge to improve organisational procedures. To overcome  the first hurdle, the RIMSAT system will be validated in a safety-critical  environment where the sharing of knowledge is not only vital but is considered the norm. The third hurdle mentioned will be addressed by the inclusion of a process to measure the impact of knowledge management on the effectiveness of the decisions taken by an organisation in dealing with safety-critical situations.

Objectives:
RIMSAT objectives are:
- to develop an  innovative, "learning" knowledge-based decision support system aimed at organisations involved in highly complex, safety and/or mission critical activities and events, irrespective of their location;
- to elicit both tacit and explicit knowledge, information and data from a variety of formal and  informal sources to provide a best practice, dynamic advice and guidance system available at any fixed or mobile location that has access to any terminal with wired or wireless communication capability;
- to ensure that the system will continually "learn" from previous experiences, enabling the advice & guidance it determines to represent the best practice available at that specific moment in time;
- to prove the concept of the system through real-world  trials in a highly complex, safety-critical environment;
- to use the system  as the basis for collaborative distance learning/training through customisable  event/incident simulation.
- Enabling existing skills to be improved and  new skills to be acquired without the need to remove personnel from their centre  of operations for extended periods of time.

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Annual Report:
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