Enabling Knowledge Creation Through Associative Networks and Semantic Web Technologies

Nowadays the organizations operate in an evolving and dynamic environment and to keep an advantage over the other companies they need new management techniques as well as improved applications, where inter-operability can support innovative thinking. The goal of these tools is twofold. To improve the information retrieval processes and the finding of competencies within the organization in order to establish the conditions for the creation of knowledge and the generation of communities of practice. This objective cannot be resolved without flexible knowledge representation structured as associative networks, which are capable to define user models, i.e. representations of their knowledge, their competencies and their objectives. But this subsymbolic representation must be formalized to optimize the search of information. We think that, for knowledge management purposes, the better way is to reify the employees’ conceptualizations of the read documents. The obtained representations of the knowledge acquired every day by the workers can be further improved by the use of existing ontologies. We provide some example of researches performed with the aid of these representations