K-link+: A P2P semantic virtual office for organizational knowledge management

This chapter introduces a distributed framework for OKM (Organizational Knowledge Management) which allows IKWs (Individual Knowledge Workers) to build virtual communities that manage and share knowledge within workspaces. The proposed framework, called K-link+, supports the emergent way of doing business of IKWs, which allows users to work at any time from everywhere, by exploiting the VO (Virtual Office) model. Moreover, since semantic aspects represent a key point in dealing with organizational knowledge, K-link+ is supported by an ontological framework composed of: (i) an UO (Upper Ontology), which defines a shared common background on organizational knowledge domains; (ii) a set of UO specializations, namely Workspace Ontologies or Personal Ontologies, that can be used to manage and search content; (iii) a set of COKE (Core Organizational Knowledge Entities) which provides a shared definition of human resources, technological resources, knowledge objects, services; and (iv) an annotation mechanism that allows users to create associations between ontology concepts and knowledge objects. K-link+ features a hybrid (partly centralized and partly distributed) protocol to guarantee the consistency of shared knowledge and a distributed voting mechanism to foster the evolution of ontologies on the basis of user needs. © 2009, IGI Global.