Towards Knowledge Morphing: A Triangulation Approach to link Tacit and Explicit Knowledge

Abstract

Current knowledge management systems are greatly designed to deal with a single knowledge modality. Given the diversity of knowledge modalities that cover any given topic it is quite reasonable to be able to use all available knowledge, irrespective of their representation formalism, to derive a knowledge-mediated solution. For deriving such a solution, there is a need to select all knowledge elements (represented in different modalities) that are relevant to the solution of the problem at hand. Thus here, the author pursues the specification and implementation of such a knowledge management framework that allows for the systematic compilation and organization of such holistic medical knowledge by semi autonomously linking/mapping of contextually and functionally similar medical knowledge originating from different sources and represented in diverse modalities. This tacit-explicit knowledge morphing (TEKM) system/framework supports the extraction of tacit knowledge from past cases stored in a case-base and maps it with corresponding explicit knowledge stored in clinical practice guidelines. The novelty of this approach is inherent in the fact that it uses the explicit knowledge acquired from scientific research in tandem with experiential knowledge found in past cases thus linking/mapping the two modalities of knowledge.