Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge Management: Position Paper

Knowledge is considered to be “the information needed to make business decisions”1, and so knowledge management is the “essential ingredient of success” for 95 per cent of CEOs [Manchester 1999]. A company’s value depends increasingly on “intangible assets” which exist in the minds of employees, in databases, in files and in a myriad documents. Knowledge management technologies capture this intangible element in an organisation; and make it universally available. The most widely used method of mapping the knowledge of a domain is to use an ontology describing such a domain. Ontologies can act as an index to the memo ry of an organisation and facilitate semantic searches and the retrieval of knowledge from the corporate memory as it is embodied in documents and other archives. There are many real-world examples where the utility of ontologies as maps or models of specific domains has been repeatedly proven.