A case study: using UML to develop a knowledge-based system for supporting business systems in a small financial institute

Abstract

Financial industry is a core industry in Hong Kong. The business systems in financial institutes are widely applied throughout their front, mid, and back office. The system specialist who supports these systems must have finance and information-systems knowledge. This multi-disciplinary requirement leads to difficulties in finding capable candidates. It is reasonably assumed that a knowledge-based system (KBS) with the intelligence of a system specialist can assist a helpdesk to support the business systems. However, KBS development involves many known issues. In particular, the uncertainties of collected knowledge should be discussed and remodelled iteratively until the final knowledge set is close to the actual knowledge. Although the literature states that it is theoretically feasible to use Unified Modelling Language (UML) on knowledge acquisition, case studies on this area to date have been insufficient, hence this research experiment UML on developing a KBS for supporting business systems in a financial institute. The method of using UML diagrams is documented throughout the study. The results show that the UML was useful in different stages of KBS development. The case study articulates how the KBS helps to solve business system problems in the company. In summary, this paper can shed light on future research in using UML for KBS development.

Keywords:

• Business process management
• Case-study research
• Knowledge-based system
• Unified modelling language

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the support offered by a Central Grant of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University under Project Number G-YA19 and Department of Computer Sciences, The City University of Hong Kong.