Knowledge Management revisited: needn’t you represent what you want to manage?

Knowledge Management is a discipline that investigates how to consolidate and augment individuals’ expertise and know-how and how to make them part of a corporate knowledge asset. We believe that this goal can not be achieved without defining a structured representation of the enterprise knowledge asset, that should act as the explicit context inside which each individual matches and augments his own individual knowledge. Such representation is what, in the Artificial Intelligence community, has been called Knowledge Base. In this paper we compare the definitions of knowledge given in the Knowledge Management and Artificial Intelligence community and present one of the main agreed principles beyond Knowledge Management: how corporate knowledge flows and is augmented in a cyclic process, called “knowledge cycle”. We then describe our view and our experiences about how the different sub-processes of the knowledge cycle can be made concrete by means of Information Technology tools acting on an explicit representation of the corporate knowledge. We give also some hints about how such representation can be used as a gluing factor to make the whole cycle concrete.