Knowledge Management: Using Topic Maps in Organizational Memory

Organizational memories play a significant role in knowledge management but several challenges confront their use. Artifacts of OM are many and varied. Access and use of the stored artifact is influenced by the user´s understanding of these information objects as well as their context. Theories of distributed cognition and the notion of community of practice are used to develop a model of the knowledge management system. Topic maps are used in this implementation to represent user cognition of contextualized information. Topic maps also allow for access and analysis of stored memory artifacts. The paper presents the design and development of a system to accomplish this