Knowledge management tools:

component technologies
 LEARNING OBJECTIVES
• Describe different component technologies
found in knowledge management;
• Explain the different technologies for
capturing, organizing, storing and sharing
new knowledge;
• Contrast the functions of different component
technologies;
• Feel confident about selecting appropriate
knowledge management technologies for
particular needs.
 Introduction
• In case of a purchaser of KM systems or
technologies, the internet provides a multitude
of vendors promising to transform your
business. But where do you start? How do
you understand the complexity of the offering
and its effectiveness with your business
problem?
Slide 1.5

COMPONENT TOOLS TYPOLOGY

Figure 7.1 A typology of knowledge tools and component technologies

Jashapara, Knowledge Management: An Integrated Approach, 2nd Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2011
• Firms may decide to buy different components off-
the-shelf or develop their own tools to meet their
needs. One can purchase cheap or expensive KM
technologies. Rather than becoming mesmerized by
the power of these technologies, it is important to
remain focused on the organizational needs that are
driving the procurement of these technologies and
whether an alternative may suffice.
• The focus of technology is on hardware and
software and managers can underestimate the value
of knowledge content.

• Business managers indicated that the most

important types of knowledge that would help them
act effectively were:
– knowledge about customers (97 per cent);

– knowledge about best practice and effective processes (87 per cent);

– knowledge about competencies and capabilities of their company (86

per cent).
• The most common technologies employed by
organizations were:
– creating an intranet (47 per cent);

– creating data warehouses (33 per cent);

– implementing decision-support tools (33 per cent);

– implementing groupware to support collaboration (33 per

cent).
• The predominant KM tools used today tend to focus
on explicit knowledge. The future challenge in this
area is to develop tools to enable tacit knowledge to
be made explicit in an easy and effortless manner.

• Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the oldest fields in

computer science and provides the foundation for
many KM technologies illustrated in this chapter.
 Organizing knowledge tools
Ontology and taxonomy
• Knowledge can come in a variety of forms:
– Structured, semi-structured or unstructured.
• In order to organize this knowledge, one starts by
gathering knowledge and working out a way to
group, index or categories it in some way. One
could present a schema conceptualizing a
vocabulary of terms and relationships to
represent the knowledge.

• This is called a ‘knowledge map’ or an ‘ontology’.

DIFFERENT FORMS OF
KNOWLEDGE

Different forms of knowledge

Ontology Definition
• If each one of us tried to organize the same
knowledge, we might come up with wide variations
depending on our understanding and perspective
on the subject.

• Gruber (1993) defines ontology as:

‘a formal, explicit specification of shared

conceptualization.’
• This implies that a domain ontology provides us with a
formalized vocabulary for describing a given domain.
Ontology Vs. taxonomy
• It is important to recognize that an ontology is an
overall conceptualization whereas a taxonomy is a
‘scientifically based scheme of classification’.
Ontology and taxonomy (cont.)
• These ontologies and taxonomies have a
significant impact on our ability to deal with vast
amounts of information such as that found on the
internet or corporate intranets.
• Uschold and Gruninger (1996) have provided a
useful approach to build ontologies manually to
achieve these aims:
Ontology and taxonomy (cont.)
• However, apart from being time consuming,
manually generated ontologies have the added
problem of being prone to errors and can pose
difficulties in maintaining and updating them.

• If there are significant delays in updating

ontologies, this can cause problems in their
usefulness and hinder their development.
 Ontology and taxonomy (cont.)
• Concepts are extracted from raw data using a variety
of relatively mature techniques such as:
– ‘part-of-speech (POS)’ tagging to extract high-frequency
words or phrases that could be used to define concepts and
may perform a syntactic analysis;
– ‘word sense disambiguation’ to extract relations such as
‘is-a’ and ‘associated with’ where the distinction lies in the
linguistic property of the nouns;
– ‘tokenizes’ to break strings into a series of tokens between
two delimiting characters (such as the spacing between
words) and determine the length of each string;
– ‘pattern matching’ – for example, a system may learn a
semantic lexicon of paired words with their meanings and
have the ability to extract phrase-meaning pairs from a
document.
Ontology and taxonomy (cont.)
• Automatic ontology generation or classification
tools have advanced to such a point that they are
comparable to manual classifiers of ontology in a
well organized operation.

• A fundamental aspect of the current generation of

automatic classifiers is their use of ‘machine
learning’ to train themselves from example data
which can give rise to refined distinctions given a
wide variety of training data.

•
Ontology integration techniques
• Ontologies are dynamic. Concepts and schemas
do change their meaning and sense relations over
time. How can we reuse existing ontologies and
incorporate new meanings, relations, domains and
knowledge over time?

• There is likely to be a need to integrate existing

ontologies with new domains.
• This can create numerous problems, such as
semantic inconsistencies and differences in
knowledge formats.
Ontology integration techniques (cont.)
• The current approaches for integrating a number of
ontologies include:
– reusing available ontologies linking different domains;

– aligning ontologies by establishing links between them

through some form of translation function using agent
technology;

– merging ontologies to create a single ontology;

– integrating ontologies through clustering on the basis of

similarities.
Slide 1.20

Jashapara, Knowledge Management: An Integrated Approach, 2nd Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2011
 Capturing knowledge tools
Cognitive mapping tools
• The map is a visual representation of the domain
which makes explicit mentally the concepts that
exist within that domain and the relationships
between them. In many cases, this map is likely
to be tacit and unarticulated within an individual
or an organization. This tacit knowledge is a key
source of competitive advantage as it is difficult to
articulate, imitate.
Cognitive mapping tools
• Cognitive mapping provides a valuable tool to
represent an individual’s knowledge and
experience and their view of reality

‘How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?’

• Currently, the main application for cognitive

mapping tools is in the area of mapping strategic
knowledge through the use of causal maps.
Causal Maps
• Causal maps are cognitive maps that can establish
multiple relationships between entities through
causal links.
• For example, entity A may ‘cause’ entity B and D
and the complexity of other relationships can be
depicted graphically, as shown in Figure
Causal Maps (cont.)
• The advantage of causal mapping tools is that they
provide a way of ordering and analyzing something
that is ‘fuzzy’ and vague and allow us to impose a
structure on the fuzziness and visualize the
relationships between concepts.
• The most developed application of cognitive
mapping tools has been in the field of strategy
making to help surface and explore tacit
knowledge, assumptions, assertions, values,
beliefs, aspirations and concerns within a
management team or board of directors.
creating a cognitive map
• The most common method of creating a cognitive
map is through the ‘oval mapping technique’ and
software that aids the mapping process (Decision
Explorer™ with effective representation, retrieval
and analytical support,.
Slide 1.26

Jashapara, Knowledge Management: An Integrated Approach, 2nd Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2011
creating a cognitive map
• In strategy development, the causal maps are
reorganized into clusters following a ‘tear drop’
model where aspirations and goals are at the top of
the model
Information-retrieval tools
• The key goal in information retrieval is to retrieve
knowledge that may be useful or relevant to a user.

• There have been two processes involved in

information retrieval.
– The creation of an index that enables the location of a
text and document structure.

– The second process is solving a user’s information

needs in the form of a query through algorithms and
ranking the results in some form of relevance to the user.
• The three most common index structures are as follows:
– Inverted files: These are currently the best choice for most
applications. An inverted index is composed of the
vocabulary or different words in the text and their
occurrences in terms of their precise storage location.

– Suffix trees: These form a tree data structure of the text

rather than assuming the text is a sequence of words.
These indices are particularly helpful for answering
complex queries for non-word-based applications such as
genetic database.

– Signature files: These are index structures that divide text

into blocks for analysis. They help reduce the size of
documents to speed retrieval but impose a sequential
mode of searching from one text block to another.
CAPTURING KNOWLEDGE
Indexing a Text Database

Indexing a text database

• The query can be expressed in a variety of forms:
– Boolean operators : (such as OR, AND and BUT) have
precise semantics and are used most commonly by
commercial systems. This is the most popular approach.
The main drawback is that exact matching of Boolean
expressions may result in too few or too many documents..
– Vector expressions: Assign weights to index terms
according to their frequency in a document. The premise is
that the lower frequency of an index term is likely to have
much greater relevance in a search than a highly occurring
index term.
– Probabilistic expressions : try to assign probabilities to
documents that it assumes users will find relevant. This
approach is problematic.
– Fuzzy expressions : Use a thesaurus to expand the query
into related terms to allow additional documents to be
retrieved.
CAPTURING KNOWLEDGE
Retrieval Process

Information retrieval process