A Four-Layer Model for IT Support of Knowledge Management

Strategies for knowledge management as well as strategies for ITsystems supporting knowledge management have often been conceived to serve one particular knowledge management paradigm. We argue that in practice there is not one paradigm that suits all needs of all organizations. Considering knowledge management as a measure to further communication in an organization we find that different ways of organizing communication exist some of which are not well supported by current IT-systems for knowledge management. In particular, we investigate two dimensions of communication, first, the vocabulary or knowledge structures used to organize, i.e. annotate, store and retrieve, the knowledge using means such as Semantic Web technology, second, the way of organizing access to the knowledge in a more or less distributed manner involving technologies like distributed databases, agentbased or peer-to-peer based systems. Based on these dimensions we overview existing knowledge sharing systems and elaborate on novel knowledge sharing models and tools. Thus, we derive a four layer model for IT support of knowledge management, where only one layer for centralized knowledge sharing is well understood, where the layers of individual and decentralized knowledge management are currently intensively researched and where the forth layer of evolutionary knowledge management is just appearing on current research agendas.