Developing Indigenous Knowledge Management Process Model for Traditional Medicine:(The Case of Oromia Region)

The indigenous knowledge is a large body of knowledge and skills that has been developed outside the formal educational system. Traditional medicine knowledge is one part of indigenous knowledge that human intelligence is used by traditional practitioners to prepare and treat all activities that take place in the system. Though the country has much indigenous knowledge, knowledge management practices in traditional medicine and other organization is less than an expectation. The main objective of this research was to capture the tacit knowledge owned by traditional healers in Oromo Guji and to increase continuity of the traditional medicine knowledge for sharing and training of other traditional healers. To develop the model with the prototype, the required knowledge for this study was collected through interview from traditional medicine practitioners and document analysis, on headache cases and other related relevant documents. Then the case-based reasoning for headache diagnosis is designed by using jCOLIBRI programming tool integrating with Eclipse and Nearest Neighbor retrieval algorithm and Feature vector knowledge(case) representation method was adopted to establish the case base from headache. Mainly the retrieval performance of the prototype is measured by precision and recall, and the reuse performance also evaluated by using accuracy measurement and an average result of 80 % precision, 68% recall and 85% accuracy is scored. The prototype was evaluated by end users who are experts in the specific domain area and an average result of 76.46% is registered. Having these evaluation results and the result of other more specific evaluations such as case similarity evaluations the summed-up evaluation result of the diagnosis prototype is encouraging. The exploratory and constructive research design with a mixed research approach (qualitative, quantitative) have been used for collecting and analyzing the existing status of indigenous traditional medicine knowledge.