Knowledge networks and knowledge adjacencies

Abstract

The modern enterprise is becoming larger and geographically distributed. The structure of companies is also becoming more complicated. Oraganizations are depending on knowledge within the enterprise and outside the enterprise. More and more individuals within organizations are parts of communities of practice which at times extend the boundaries of organizations. This necessitates people in the enterprise to have access to other individuals based on their roles and expertise [12]. Individuals within teams are constantly looking for sources of expertise that they don't have. In larger organizations, it becomes extremely difficult to identify the individuals that have the relevant expertise and get in touch with the individuals.

Organizations and communities of practice have deployed knowledge management system to solve this problem with the belief that better implementation of information technologies [4] would result in more knowledge sharing and this would benefit the organizations. This has resulted in knowledge management research community being too focused on IT. A significant amount of knowledge is generated within the enterprise in communities of practice that consist of individuals both from within the enterprise and external to enterprise.

There is no standard way to represent and access knowledge in the enterprise. Most of the knowledge within the enterprise resides in the form of documents, communications and in the mind of people. In this paper we define a way to represent the knowledge in the form of knowledge ontology. We also define system for generating knowledge networks that exist within the organization.