Using Ontologies for Integrated Knowledge Management in Organization Design and Engineering

Knowledge management (KM) can be defined as “identifying and leveraging the collective knowledge in an organization to help the organization compete” (Alavi and Leidner, 2001). Knowledge is often considered the most valuable resource in any organization (Teece, 1998) because the expertise and innovative capacities of employees represent the only resource that cannot be copied and is unique to the employees and their interactions to create intellectual synergies. Therefore, the ability to effectively capture, organize, and disseminate this knowledge to the people who need it is crucial to the success and competitive advantage of the firm, and it requires a sound foundation. Knowledge management has been considered to be essentially about purposeful actions carried out inside an entity to manage its capabilities with the aim of accomplishing its objectives (Holsapple and Joshi, 2004).