There are, however, limitations to the use of ontologies. The existing software support
for the creation and maintenance of ontologies is limited at best (cf. OntoWeb
Consortium 2002). The construction and maintenance of these formalizations is a
complex, time consuming process and requires the participation of the potential users
(Staab et al. 2001). The integration of existing ontologies is difficult as well, as the
mapping or merging of relationships between the terms in the respective ontologies
requires a lot of manual interventions. This will make it difficult to use a bottom-up
approach which exploits existing structures. Due to the complexity of the ontology
integration, the costs of this approach have to be weighted against the potential
benefits. Therefore, semantic web technologies can only provide a partial solution to
the problems posed by differing linguistic customs. If there are standardized ontologies
which have industry-wide support (which don’t exist in the field of business or engineering), using them for the creation of semantic metadata could be a long-term
solution. It appears unrealistic, however, that all contents accessible within the
knowledge management system can be annotated ex post, and even the creation of
metadata at the time of publication is often shunned by users (Kogut and Holmes
2001). Hence, metadata-based search should be tightly integrated with full text search
instruments. Additionally, face-to-face contacts between the employees involved, e.g.
in regular meetings, will improve mutual understanding significantly.
5 Conclusion
Establishing a coherent IT infrastructure for knowledge management in distributed
environments is a complex task. Tools which may be employed without difficulties in
integrated enterprises display notable deficits in supporting inter-company knowledge
management. There is a three-fold integration challenge, on the technical, the
organizational and on the content level which cannot be solved by technology
completely. The integration on the technical level may be done using a portal system.
Portals enable the integration of functions such as knowledge repositories, publication,
retrieval and user management. A large number of portal systems have been
developed by commercial software vendors. They are ready to be deployed, and while
the task at hand is complex, there is a technological solution. As far as the
organizational level is concerned, the challenges posed by the need for a rights
management architecture can be tackled by IT as well. It has to be noted, though, this
will require a trusting relationship between the partners which can’t be generated by
technological means. On the content level, however, a technological solution is not
likely to be available in the near future. In the area of semantic metadata, the solutions
offered so far are still in development. While there is a large number of (mainly
scientific) prototypes, commercial solutions based on W3C standards have not yet
emerged. Besides, the cost-benefit relationship has to be analyzed critically. As far as
problems of mutual understanding are concerned, it appears that non-technological
solutions are superior, at least at the present state of development. It becomes clear
that, while IT plays an important role in inter-company knowledge management, it does
not offer solutions to all problems