The complete cycle of knowledge includes a series of episodes. A
knowledge worker seeks and retrieves knowledge from the portal and then
organizes and analyses it so that it may be used to make decisions or take
action. Finally, the outcome is shared and disseminated as lessons learned. This
knowledge is then stored in a place that can be accessed by other colleagues.
The user can obtain knowledge from people with the required expertise or
from documents and other artifacts, thus capitalizing on past experiences. In
order to make them more useful, documents and artifacts accessed through a
portal include a summary, authorship, type, date and other contextual data.