Knowledge Maps of Knowledge Management Tools - Information Visualization with BibTechMon

• Authors: Margit Noll;Doris Fröhlich;Edgar Schiebel
• Venue: PAKM '02 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management
• Year: 2002

Companies, R&D-departments or managers are confronted with an increasing amount of information which has to be analysed corresponding to their importance and applicability for the company and the current question. For this purpose information from internal or external sources like internal documents, patent information, literature quotations or internet information has to be identified, surveyed, read, distributed and used. Especially the search for relevant information and the decision about their applicability gets more and more time-consuming. In order to reduce the efforts for structuring and sorting information the Department of Technology Management of the ARC Seibersdorf research GmbH has developed the software tool BibTechMon for structuring, visualising and analysing large amounts of information. Several thousands of documents available from external or in-house databases or from internet can be worked up with the software BibTechMon. The advantage of this method is based on the possibility of content-based structuring of the information, the identification of subtopics, the visualisation of the contents, of structure and connections of the information and the subtopics. Application fields are wide-spread -- from patent management, technology monitoring or analysis of internal documents up to competitive analysis of companies and products and identification of co-operation behaviour of persons or institutions. Therefore BibTech-Mon allows the mapping of information to support internal communication, information retrieval and strategic decision support. Due to its different fields of application in the context of knowledge management, BibTechMon is part of a fast growing number of software tools designed to support knowledge management. The exploding amount of software products on that sector make it rather impossible to get a sufficient overview or to select the appropriate tool for a given question. In order to support the analysis and classification of software tools for knowledge management a survey was performed and analysed with BibTechMon. Using this example the possibilities of our method will be demonstrated as well as an overview over the results of our survey will be given.