Creating the Knowledge-structured Texts in Agriculture Companies: A Cost Modeling Approach

Abstract

Agriculture is one of the most regulated sectors. Council regulations, national legal acts, subsidies, nature protection, market regulations and many other directives induce the necessity to work with a lot of text documents and to manage the knowledge in them. Thus, it is worth considering the creation of specifically designed internal documents to represent knowledge explicitly in so-called "knowledge-structured texts". However, it is a costly process to create the knowledge texts. The objective of this paper is to create a model that is capable of showing what time point the successive costs of the two types of text are equal at. Linking the methods of knowledge engineering and management is carried out with the help of an integrating element, i.e. general systems theory, through system dynamics. Despite an initial investment in the knowledge texts, the results show their potential for lowering the costs in the middle-and long-term horizons.