An Ontology-Based Collaborative Interorganizational Knowledge Management Network (Cik-Net)

Knowledge is recognized as one of the most important and valuable management assets because knowledge enables organizations to utilize and develop resources, enhance their competitiveness and develop sustainable competitive advantage. A number of knowledge management approaches have been developed with the purpose of managing organizational knowledge. However, these approaches only focus on managing intra-organizational knowledge which is inadequate in the current business environment because users are often required to access inter-organizational knowledge from other knowledge sources in order to complete their tasks. Furthermore, these approaches also fail to collaborate with each other due to the fact that their designs are based on their own business and knowledge management requirement in managing organizational knowledge. These non-collaborative knowledge management approaches create independent “knowledge islands”. In this paper, ontology and its mediation methods are proposed to overcome the limitation of “knowledge islands” so that organizations are able to reuse the retrieved inter-organizational knowledge in supporting organizational knowledge management process. To allow knowledge management systems of various organizations to collaborate, we propose to develop an ontology-based Collaborative Interorganizational knowledge management Network. The proposed network is designed to provide a platform for organizations to access and retrieve inter-organizational knowledge of common domain.