Enterprise Knowledge Management and Emerging Technologies

Improving management of information and knowledge in organizations has long been a major objective, but efforts to address it often foundered. Knowledge typically resides in structured documents, informal discussions that may or may not persist online, and in tacit form. Terminology differences and dispersed contextual information hinder efforts to use formal representations. Features of dynamic emerging technologies — unstructured tagging, web-logs, and search — show strong promise in overcoming past obstacles. They exploit digital representations of less formal language and could greatly increase the value of such representations.