K-link: A peer-to-peer solution for organizational knowledge management

In the latest years knowledge management received more and more attention as a source of competitive advantage for enterprises and organizations, therefore becomes important to understand how computer science solutions should be designed to efficiently manage knowledge. Most of the current knowledge management systems use technological architectures that are in contradiction with the social processes concerning the creation of new knowledge, slowing down organizational innovation. Actually, most of those systems use centralized architectures filtering knowledge from any form of personal and contextual interpretation. Recently a new paradigm supporting cooperative and dynamic aspects of knowledge management (KM) has been proposed: Distributed Knowledge Management (DKM). In particular, peer to peer (P2P) architectures seem to naturally fulfil the requirements of this new model. Nevertheless, current P2P architectures suffer from heavy limitations due to the lack of semantic supports for handling knowledge. To overcome these limitations, the scientific community is appraising the possibility of using ontologies as a semantic support in KM processes. This paper presents an ontology based P2P system for DKM named K-link. The system design and its implementation are described. Moreover an ad hoc ontology framework for supporting organizational KM is also presented. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.