With the aim to manage and retrieve the organizational knowledge, in the last years numerous proposals of models and tools for knowledge management and knowledge representation have arisen. However, most of them store knowledge in a non-structured or semi-structured way, hindering the semantic and automatic processing of this knowledge. In this chapter the authors specify a case-based organizational memory ontology, which aims at contributing to the design of an organizational memory based on cases so that it can be used to support better decision-making. One ontology goal is to serve as a base for the organizational knowledge exchange with semantic power, which can facilitate the reuse, interoperability, and automatic processing by agents. In addition, the ontology aims to be at a high level from which other more specific representations can be formulated. In order to illustrate its utility a practical case is shown.
TopIntroduction
The organizational knowledge management represents a key asset to
support decision-making processes by different organizational
stakeholders. The main aim of knowledge management systems is to
manage, store and retrieve the organizational knowledge, so that it
can be used later to learn, share knowledge, solve problems, and
ultimately to support better decision-making processes (Conklin, 1996; Dogson, 1993). Therefore by
having a well-developed organizational memory that supports the
structuring, reusing and processing of organizational knowledge is a
primary decision (and likely a success factor) to achieve such an
effective management.
Nonaka and Takeuchi have said that an organization cannot create
knowledge itself. Conversely, the knowledge creation basis for an
organization is the individual’s tacit knowledge; and
tacit knowledge is shared through interpersonal interactions (Nonaka & Takeuchi,
1995). In the same direction, Hedberg (1981) has said that an organization does not
have brain, but it has cognitive systems and memories. The
organizational stakeholders act as the agents of organizational
learning, and a link between them and organizational learning
systems have to be established.
Therefore, in order to reach and maintain the organizational
effectiveness and competitiveness, an organization needs to learn
from past and present experiences and lessons learnt and to
formalize organizational memories for enabling to make explicit the
individual’s tacit knowledge -and why not
community’s tacit knowledge as well.
It is worth mentioning that one of the possible classifications of
organizational knowledge can be, namely: public/private,
explicit/implicit (or tacit), and formal (syntactically and
semantically structured)/informal (unstructured). One of the main
goals of an organizational knowledge management strategy is to make
explicit the individuals’ implicit knowledge, to try to
formalize the informal knowledge in order to allow
machine-processable semantic inferences, and to make the knowledge
public or private depending on the strategic policy at different
organization levels.
So far most of the current knowledge management systems capture and
store the knowledge in repositories of documents like manuals,
memos, and text files systems, and the knowledge transfer is made by
means of meetings, courses or by documented manuals and guides. This
traditional form of storing and transferring knowledge causes loss
of time and high investment in human resources, since it does not
consider powerful mechanisms of semantic and automatic processing of
knowledge.