An Ontology-based Knowledge Management System for Industry Clusters

Knowledge-based economy forces companies in every country to group together as a cluster in order to maintain their competitiveness in the world market. The cluster development relies on two key success factors which are knowledge sharing and collaboration between the actors in the cluster. Thus, our study tries to propose a knowledge management system to support knowledge management activities within the cluster. To achieve the objectives of the study, ontology takes a very important role in the knowledge management process in various ways; such as building reusable and faster knowledge-bases and better ways of representing the knowledge explicitly. However, creating and representing ontology creates difficulties to organization due to the ambiguity and unstructured nature of the source of knowledge. Therefore, the objectives of this paper are to propose the methodology to capture, create and represent ontology for organization development by using the knowledge engineering approach. The handicraft cluster in Thailand is used as a case study to illustrate our proposed methodology.