Enabling personal knowledge management with collaborative and semantic technologies

Abstract

Editor's Summary Personal knowledge management (PKM) has come to be a central and critical element in the spectrum of knowledge management. The context and control of knowledge management is shifting from global and organizational levels to communities and ultimately to individuals. In developing a model for managing personal intellectual capital, two basic issues stand out. First, we must attend to the broad context of the individual represented on social networks, collaborative environments and other channels. Second, individuals should assume ownership, active management and control over information about themselves by building a formal PKM profile. We can collect elements of our personal information, aided by semantic and knowledge technologies for discovery and normalization, to compile and manage as our own intellectual capital. Work in progress at Kent State University has highlighted important lessons in personal knowledge management, including the foundational role of semantics and the need for a standard definition for a personal data model.