Knowledge Management Processes Supported by Ontology Technologies

Although ontologies have been used in a considerable number of knowledge management projects, in most of them their application has been limited to the definition of a common organizational language. This chapter offers an alternative view on the use of ontologies, supporting all of the knowledge management processes, including generation, acquisition, transference, and integration of knowledge. The focus of this chapter is on presenting how ontologies can be included in knowledge management systems to promote availability of knowledge, knowledge evolution, automatic and semi-automatic knowledge extraction, and integration of heterogeneous sources of information. Each one of these characteristics is supported by ontology technologies including the processes required to engineer and manage an ontology, such as: querying, mapping, and evolution. Finally, the architecture of a proposed knowledge management system that uses ontologies to improve its processes is presented.