KIWI: A Framework for Enabling Semantic Knowledge Management

Introduction And Motivations

The widespread diffusion of Internet, broadband availability and accessing devices have changed the way human beings develop their professional lives, the way people work and look for information, the way people book and have entertainment, and the way people live their personal relationships. This new “hardware” context (i.e., cabled and wireless networks) has opened the doors to a new way of content diffusion and to a new generation of applications, called generally Web 2.0, which is enabling Web surfers to be direct protagonists of the content creation (Anderson, 2007).

This powerful technological context and this wider and wider content availability have put a new question: how can we use them? This is the context the project “KIWI” tried to face. The strategy and the solutions provided by the research carried out for this project contribute to the “Semantic Web” research stream (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

While the new “hardware” conditions enable new software capabilities, society and all its business processes require users to exploit them to obtain new and more powerful results. Technological innovations enable Web surfers to put into practice their creativity and imagination. In the end, all aspects of the everyday life are nicked by this technological trend. “Knowledge workers” (Drucker, 1994) have now an extremely powerful tool for their work. Being information reachable in a few clicks, the knowledge worker can focus on its more valuable activities: extracting knowledge from the information space, creating new knowledge from the assembled information, planning and carrying out knowledge-based projects, configuring connections among data and information. That is, the knowledge worker can be focused more on reasoning and applying knowledge than looking for data and information.

Another important aspect of the life of organizations which changed with Internet concerns team management and the collaborative behaviour in a team and among teams. Today, people can collaborate on a global scale, expert communities have emerged and are glued together using Internet-based collaboration; networks of practitioners meet on virtual squares (Gloor, 2006). Wider teams and communities mean more (tacit and explicit) knowledge, more perspectives, more expertise, and then more creative capabilities (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). Being so, organizations started to use Web to improve collaboration in their teams, and as a by-product, even free interests-based communities emerged, generally called CoP (Wenger, 1999).

The Web is a platform even for other types of social networks: user and consumer communities that are communities that have as main aim the exchange of knowledge on specific topics, as the performance and the usability of a software or the behaviour of firms. In the end, people are experiencing a new way of collaborating, sharing knowledge, obtaining helps and suggestions, so that today very few questions cannot be answered via Internet.

From an organizational point of view, projects can be carried out without any regional limits in this way organizations are transforming themselves from being “multinational” to being really “global,” from a stage where each factory builds its relations and partnerships on a local or national level to a stage where supply chains connect actors from many nations. From this point of view, the Internet is the infrastructure on which globalization spreads over, while communication is cheaper, simpler and more complete day by day; working side by side is not a location problem but a band problem and this makes the “global company” real (Malone, 2004; Tapscott & Williams, 2006).