A Framework for Knowledge Management in Distributed Collaborative Enterprise

In this paper we discuss the importance of ontologies in the knowledge management practices in the context of distributed enterprise, their maturation processes, the corresponding stages in their maturation, and the collaborative aspect of their creation. We then present our workflow and corresponding authoring tool architecture for the creation of semantic document, a sub concept in the ontology based knowledge management of the enterprise; these documents are annotated with domain and document ontology, so they have both, their local and global contextual information. The authors further delineate in detail, the ontology maturation workflow stage in the semantic document creation. Ontologies are important in the context of knowledge management practices i.e. knowledge management in distributed enterprises, and e-learning; at the same time the collaborative aspects of ontology maturation has to be considered in order to integrate different scopes within the ontology, but how to manage this ontology maturation process, namely the ontology change management process, in a collaborative and distributed environment; under which ontology data integration models e.g. central, hierarchical, modular or distributed etc. What are the functional requirements of the workflow engines for these collaborative and distributed activities? These are the research question posed, and are partially tackled in this publication.