A competence knowledge base system as part of the organizational memory

Abstract

Personal competences of experienced employees are the most important knowledge assets of knowledge-work oriented enterprises. Thus, it makes perfect sense to start IT support for enterprise knowledge management with a system that facilitates finding of appropriate contact persons for business tasks which require specific knowledge, experiences, or skills. We propose such a competence knowledge base system (CKBS) which builds upon an ontology-based model of competence fields, the use of which allows (i) comprehensive multi-criteria organization and queries for personal competences, (ii) complex heuristic inferences for finding knowledgeable persons in spite of vaguely specified information needs, and (iii) easy integration of the CKBS into an overall organizational memory information system. © 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.