CYCLADES: An Environment for the Cooperative Management of Digital Information

Knowledge management is often viewed as a structured process of eliciting knowledge, storing knowledge, and later retrieval by individuals. In this paper we argue that knowledge management should be seen as a dynamic process—an interaction between experts. Therefore, environments should support the cooperative management of information in workgroups or online communities. We start with a motivation for this cooperative perspective of supporting knowledge management through support for the creation and exchange of knowledge in communities. We introduce the CYCLADES environment—an open cooperative virtual archive environment based on open archives. We report in detail on the requirements analysis and functional design, on the specification, on the implementation, as well as on the evaluation of the environment. Finally, we draw conclusions for the design and implementation of cooperative knowledge management. Subject Categories and descriptors: H.1 [MODELS AND PRINCIPLES]: E.4 [Formal models of communication]; H.3.3 [Information Search and Retrieval[; H.2 [Database Management] General Terms: Knowledge management