skillMap: Identification of parallel developments and of Communities of Practice in distributed organizations

Virtual and large organizations are facing issues of reduced knowledge transparency. Graph-based knowledge management (KM) systems promise to improve transparency: They visualize connections between individuals and fields of expertise and are thus able to display shared organizational context that may otherwise be buried in traditional document management systems. In this paper, we present a system called skillMap. It not only visualizes connections between knowledge entities, but is equally capable of automatically identifying undesired parallel developments and communities of practice. It includes people, skills and the relations between them. In this way, organizational knowledge communication is facilitated.