Capturing and managing knowledge using social software and semantic web technologies

It has often been claimed that implicit knowledge is the most important kind of knowledge within organizations. The surge of social software offers new ways to elicit and diffuse this kind of knowledge. Social software also proved to be effective knowledge management instruments, particularly when combined with semantic web technologies. The logical next step - supporting the management of implicit knowledge by using semantic web-enabled social software–has been only episodically explored. In this article we present KnowBest, a platform based on social software and semantic web tools to manage a specific class of implicit how-to knowledge in organizations. Our approach leverages social software intrinsic characteristics and extends them to allow for both knowledge and its structure to emerge and be collectively managed in a cooperative way using online tools with simplified interfaces. We use semantic web technologies to externalize implicit knowledge and enable reasoning on the knowledge base; we exploit reasoning within the platform itself in the form of a semantic recommender that is meant to enhance the ability of the users to find documented practices possibly related to the work they have at hand, affecting positively internalization too. We performed an evaluation in the context of a specific case study collecting feedbacks from users and showing that KnowBest can be successfully deployed to effectively promote how-to knowledge circulation within a community.