6 - Knowledge Management

Abstract

This chapter deals with corporate knowledge management. Corporate information is a valuable corporate asset. Corporate knowledge is more valuable corporate asset than corporate information; information is power, and knowledge is absolute power as well as security. There is a distinction between those who work with information as opposed to those who extract and leverage knowledge. The express goal of knowledge management is to enhance and continually refresh a corporation's knowledge base. Computer-based knowledge-management schemes are a set of loosely integrated electronic processes that relate to the capture, creation, analysis, distillation, organization, dissemination, utilization, and safeguarding of knowledge. Corporations also invariably have noncodified knowledge management systems based on individuals with specific insights. Corporate knowledge is extracted from the capture and analysis of various forms of information. Today, much of this information is either in proprietary, application form, or if in textual form, in an unstructured, unqualified format. Thus, there is lack of data-format compatibility as well as ambiguity. EXtensible Markup Language (XML) can resolve all these issues. It can ensure data uniformity and self-definition, thereby providing KM applications with a larger pool of readily accessible and interpretable data.