Enterprise knowledge infrastructures

Both, academics and practitioners alike have spent considerable efforts during the last years to establish ICT support for the handling of knowledge, an idea that is almost as old as the field of computer science. Not surprisingly, the solution is still not there and many businesses trying to implement these technologies have been frustrated by the fact that the technologies certainly could not live up to the overly high expectations. However, there are still numerous projects in organizations that try to tackle the fundamental challenge of how to increase productivity of knowledge work. People do not believe in quick solutions to this problem any more - and they are right. Knowledge management is dead. Long live knowledge management! Central hypothesis of this book is that the implementation of KM technology in organizations has entered a new stage. In the last years, many vendors jumped on the bandwagon and insisted that their products had ?knowledge management technology inside?. More recently, however, it seems that many technologies provided by avantgarde systems to support handling of (documented) knowledge, finding of, collaboration between and learning by people doing knowledge work, were weaved into the enterprise infrastructure implemented in many organizations. It is not anymore the quest for the best individual tool targeting a specific KM problem that organizations should engage in. Organizations should strive for improving their information and communication infrastructures so that they are able to handle semantic descriptions of integrated, semi-structured data and offer advanced knowledge services on top of them.