Knowledge has been lately recognized as one of the most important assets of
organizations. Can information technology help the growth and the sustainment of
organizational knowledge? The answer is yes, if care is taken to remember that IT here is just
a part of the story (corporate culture and work practices being equally relevant) and that the
information technologies best suited for this purpose should be expressly designed with
knowledge management in view. This special issue of the Journal of Universal Computer
Science contains a selection of papers from the First Conference on Practical Applications of
Knowledge Management. Each paper describes a specific type of information technology
suitable for the support of different aspects of knowledge management.