An Ontology-Based Collaborative Inter-Organisational Knowledge Management Network (CIK-NET)

Ontologies are widely used to represent knowledge explicitly but it is impractical to expect all individuals and organisations to agree on using one or a small subset of ontologies. The adoption of multiple ontologies causes ontology mismatches which make their inherent vocabularies and relationships become inconsistent, resulting in difficulty for one system to understand and reuse these ontologies. To achieve knowledge sharing and reuse, ontology mediation is required to reconcile mismatches between heterogeneous ontologies. In this paper, we investigate the application of ontology in knowledge management (KM). Many KM approaches have been developed with the purpose of managing organisational knowledge. However, these approaches only focus on managing intra-organisational knowledge, which is inadequate in current business environment because users are often required to access inter-organisational knowledge to complete their tasks. These approaches also fail to collaborate with each other as their designs are based on their own business and KM requirement in managing organisational knowledge. We argue that ontology and its mediation methods can be used to overcome limitation of non-collaborative problem in which individual organisation is unable to reuse inter-organisational knowledge. An ontology-based inter-organisational KM network is therefore proposed to allow organisations accessing and retrieving inter-organisational knowledge of common domain.