2. KnowMore: Knowledge Management for Learning Organizations
KnowMore was a basic research project funded by the German government investigating design principles for OMs. In [2], we describe the three-layered system approach
of KnowMore shown in Figure 1.
The central idea of the KnowMore project is giving access
to multiple heterogeneous knowledge sources enabled
through a comprehensive knowledge description based on a
formal information ontology which in turn imports notions
from the organization and the application domain ontologies
of the company.
KnowMore realizes active information delivery integrated
into the respective business processes through the running
workflow engine. This allows an explicit representation
of context for a query which can be instantiated at runtime.
Heuristic retrieval from several repositories accessible
via the knowledge description level can be achieved by
navigation within the domain ontology.
Thus the KnowMore notion of knowledge can be described
as knowledge = information linked into the application
context. [3] gives an impression of the functionality of our
running system prototype.
In order to ameliorate the problem of manually annotating
knowledge sources by knowledge descriptions we implemented
an ontology editor with an integrated thesaurus
generator (TREX) and a knowledge description editor linked
with the learning text classification workbench (TCW)
developed in our research department [17].
In our above listing of four technical challenges for KM
technology, KnowMore mainly contributes to the retrieval
(and, on the fly, to the interoperability) problem on the basis
of a weak formalization and linked to a strong notion of
workflow to get the link into the application.