Conceptual approaches for personal and corporate information and knowledge management

There is a growing awareness in enterprises about the need for adequate Knowledge Management (KM) in the organisation as a key factor to sustainable competitive success of enterprises. As working patterns are rapidly changing and more flexible organisational structures are emerging, the individual "knowledge workers" have to keep track of information and knowledge in a fast evolving world characterised by information overload. What is required are generic and general purpose approaches that allow users to record a variety of knowledge together with its association to relevant information sources and to share it with colleagues in an intuitive way. An approach to this problem, using conceptual structures combined with the use of ontologies is proposed and discussed and an example of its application to the sharing of research knowledge in a University is presented.