To Boldly Know: Enabling JPL Lessons Learned with Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge offices within NASA are mandated to collect and disseminate lessons learned which describe "the original driving event" that inspired the learning, and which provide "recommendations that feed into NASA's continual improvement via training, best practices, policies, and procedures" (NASA, 2021). However, as with many organizational lessons learned programs, there are often difficulties in ensuring lessons are captured in a timely manner and with enough context that they can effectively inform future work. This project report will detail work done by information professionals at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to reinvent the local lessons learned process. The JPL team completed a Lean Six Sigma effort to better understand the challenges presented by the lessons learned mandate. Through the course of this project, the team designed a semantically-enriched lessons learned capture and catalog system. The new process designed by the JPL team minimizes the barrier to entry for users creating new lessons learned, while also supporting a significantly improved ability to filter lessons based on controlled metadata fields when users are attempting to find and learn from lessons.