Knowledge management through ontologies

Abstract

Most enterprises agree that knowledge is an essential asset for success and survival on a increasingly competitive and global market. This awareness is one of the main reasons for the exponential growth of knowledge management in the past decade. Our approach to knowledge management is based on ontologies, and makes knowledge assets intelligently accessible to people in organizations. Most company-vital knowledge resides in the heads of people, and thus successful knowledge management does not only consider technical aspects but also social ones. In this paper, we describe an approach to intelligent knowledge management that explicitly takes into account the social issues involved. The proof of concept is given by a large-scale initiative involving knowledge management of a virtual organization.