Towards a knowledge ecosystem

• Authors: Piercarlo Slavazza;Roberto Fonti;Massimo Ferraro;Christian Biasuzzi;Luca Gilardoni
• Venue: EKAW'06 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Managing Knowledge in a World of Networks
• Year: 2006

People who belong to an organization own common knowledge that, with time, grows, evolves and is transferred from one person to another. As it happens in an ecosystem, each individual has his own work environment and personal goals, but also interacts with others, using common knowledge and contributing to its improvement. According to this vision, we have created a knowledge management environment equipped with a set of tools to better support cooperation by working along two main directions: the first one relies on establishing a community driven central repository enhanced with Semantic Web technologies, which allows information to be organized according to its semantic structure by exploiting classification, information extraction, and semantic filtering techniques. The second direction relies on enriching users' everyday work environment – including emails, web browsers, RSS aggregators, and desktops – by providing tools that exploit contextual information, directing more relevant information where it is needed and adding value to the information as it is generated and shared. The system we describe in this paper on the one hand opens up corporate knowledge even to individuals who are normally unwilling to use a traditional KM system and, on the other hand, makes access much easier to those users who are already willing to share, leading to a healthier knowledge ecosystem which grows through seamless cross fertilization.