Managing Kowledge at Multiple Organizational Levels Using Faceted Ontologies

Despite the relative maturity of knowledge management the problem of facilitating knowledge creation and sharing at multiple levels (personal, team, organizational and interorganizational) in a uniform way is still crucial. Moreover, managing knowledge at each organizational level implies a number of critical heterogeneities (representational, semantic, etc) which current solutions cannot address successfully. In this paper we present a faceted ontology which addresses the content, context, community, domain and business issues of knowledge management. We describe the ontology, its applicability and its benefits in knowledge management situations using three Knowledge Management Systems (KMSs) that we have developed: Know-Net, an intranet-based organizational KMS; IKOS, a personal and team KMS; and INKASS, an interorganizational KMS.