Knowledge reuse: Survey of existing techniques and classification approach

Abstract

The importance of managing organizational knowledge for enterprises has been recognized since decades. The expectation is that systematic development and reuse of knowledge will help to improve the competitiveness of an enterprise. The paper investigates different approaches for knowledge reuse from computer science and business information systems. Starting from a description of different knowledge reuse perspectives and examples of knowledge reuse approaches from literature, the paper proposes a classification approach for knowledge reuse techniques. The criteria included in the approach are reuse technique, reuse situation, capacity of knowledge representation, addressee of knowledge, validation status, scope and phase of solution development. The main contributions of this paper is (1) a summary of the context for knowledge reuse from knowledge management and knowledge engineering (2) a set of criteria for comparing and categorizing knowledge reuse techniques derived from literature in the field, and (3) selected reuse techniques classified according to the criteria developed as initial validation of these classification scheme.