Professional Knowledge Management - Experiences and Visions
J.UCS Special Issue
Ulrich Reimer (Bauer & Partner,
Kreuzlingen, Switzerland)
ulrich.reimer@acm.org
York Sure (Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe,
Karlsruhe, Germany)
sure@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
Abstract:Professional knowledge management is a critical
success factor in today's enterprises. The efficacy of a knowledge
management (KM) project depends heavily on a successful coordination
of issues such as corporate culture, organizational processes, human
resource management and information technology. It is currently not
well understood how best to balance and align these issues. In order
to facilitate an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas which might lead
to new, holistic approaches, the biennial conference series
"Professional Knowledge Management - Experiences and Visions" was set
up and held for the first time in March 2001 in Baden-Baden,
Germany. The second conference took place April 2003 in Luzern,
Switzerland. Some of the most interesting papers from the recent
conference have been revised and extended by their authors to appear
in this special issue of J.UCS.
Cultural aspects of KM:
In line with the interdisciplinary approach of the above-mentioned
conference, the papers selected for this issue cover a wide range of
topics. The contributions by Tomas Bohinc and Marc Kuhn focus on how
to best deal with aspects of corporate culture and how to turn them
into an important leverage for the success of a KM project. The paper
by Elisabeth Kamentz and Christa Womser-Hacker examines the impact of
country-specific cultural background on the design of e-learning
systems.
Knowledge reuse:
The reuse of knowledge that is relevant in different but similar
situations can be quite well supported by case-based reasoning. A
comparison of case-based reasoning and the more recent ontology-based
approaches to KM is given by Ralph Bergmann and Martin Schaaf. An
application of case-based reasoning in the area of software
development is presented in Markus Grabert and Derek Bridge. Ralf
Carbon and Raimund L. Feldmann also aim at supporting the reuse of
software development experience. The authors examine the use of
schemata to better capture and transfer experience. Luciana Landa
Farias et al. discuss an approach to facilitate the reuse of
experience in risk management gained in former projects.
Ontology-based approaches:
Ontology-based approaches to KM promise better access to relevant
knowledge by providing a domain-specific vocabulary that is used for
describing the contents of knowledge as well as for retrieving that
knowledge. The paper by Marcio Dias et al. examines the use of
ontologies for managing knowledge about software engineering
practices. An automatic expansion of queries for document retrieval
with concepts from a domain-specific ontology is discussed by Eddie
Moench et al. Nenad Stojanovic presents an ontology-based agent system that
acts somewhat like a human librarian to support a user in finding the
knowledge s/he is seeking. Measuring of KM projects:
The KM activities of an organization aim at improving the way the
organization works - internally as well as in interaction with its
environment. In order to better direct KM projects, their costs and
benefits need to be measured. An example of such an approach is
discussed in the contribution by Josef Hofer-Alfeis. We are confident
that the selection of articles in this journal issue gives an
interesting overview of current trends in the area of KM and that the
reader will be inspired by new insights and ideas. We are looking
forward to the successful continuation of the conference series in
2005 and would like to point interested readers to the website of the
last conference for further information:
http://wm2003.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de
Kreuzlingen (Switzerland) and Karlsruhe (Germany)
July 2003
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