CISIS 2012 Keynote

Summary form only given. The wealth of European companies has progressively shifted from tangible assets (capital, resources) into intangible ones like knowledge, competency, reputation, innovation processes and motivation. Intangibles are closely related the natural interactions occurring normally in work practices. This is where ideas, innovation, learning, knowledge (in all its various forms), relationships, social cohesion, synergistically contribute to performance, competition differentiators and value creation. Creativity and innovation inside organizations are directly related to the way people learn (informally and/or formally), collaborate, and share ideas and experience. The support of these activities within the Enterprise it is provided by several tools and environments. This doesn´t help to capture and elicitate the possible intangible assets. Even in the case where some pieces of knowledge could be extracted and captured we have the problem to provide them with a useful meaning through formalization with respect to working context (i.e. correlate them to organizational processes, objectives, tasks). The aim of this invited speech is to present the methodologies for knowledge building developed in the context of ARISTOTELE, a European Integrated Project. The methodologies for knowledge building are used for extracting tacit knowledge and using ontology matching and merging approaches to conceptualize it, with respect to models that exploit semantic web schemas (SIOC, SKOS, FOAF, MOAT, etc.) for representing different enterprise aspects like competency, worker profile, learning experience, enterprise assets.