An ontology is a tool for knowledge management whenever
it is used for meaning negotiation. However, a
coherent perspective on ontology construction from
the knowledge-management point of view is not well
defined within the current literature of both artificial
intelligence and organizational studies.
The perspective defined here is focused on three
fundamental aspects of ontology creation: the widely
recognized need for tools to be used in the generation of
a shared conceptualization for corporate knowledge
management; the generally acknowledged need for methodologies
that developers of ontologies can follow in a
coherent, systematic, and easy-to-implement way; and
the economic value of ontologies as artefacts in the
practice of knowledge management.
In particular, using the structuration-theory approach
(Giddens, 1984; Orlikowski, 1992; Orlikowski & Gash,
1994), the main features of the bidirectional method
should be analyzed, and the most important consequences
generated by using a special methodology (the bidirectional
method) should be unveiled. In particular, the
method facilitates the management of some activities
such as controlling the development of knowledge repositories
in a corporate knowledge-management system,
which may include a data warehouse, a corporate Web
portal, and intranet tools for accessing distributed data.
The major value of a systematic definition of these
aspects is the opportunity for measuring the quality of
an ontology from a social and organizational point of
view. Though the aim of this investigation is not so far to
obtain metrics and evaluation methods for ontologies,
we maintain that such a result is going to be shortly
available once the methods for building ontologies have
been defined.
An important observation is that we have three different
situations for ontology development at different
levels of difficulty: development from scratch, development
as a completion of an existing ontology, and
development as a merge (or coordination or alignment)
of several ontologies. The three cases require different
methodologies, and the methodology we have deployed
in this article is valid only for the first case. The other
two cases are also interesting extensions of the perspectives
of knowledge management we consider as the
focus of the article, and they deserve deep analysis.
However, we believe that this is possible only when
using a flexible methodology for the case from scratch.
it is used for meaning negotiation. However, a
coherent perspective on ontology construction from
the knowledge-management point of view is not well
defined within the current literature of both artificial
intelligence and organizational studies.
The perspective defined here is focused on three
fundamental aspects of ontology creation: the widely
recognized need for tools to be used in the generation of
a shared conceptualization for corporate knowledge
management; the generally acknowledged need for methodologies
that developers of ontologies can follow in a
coherent, systematic, and easy-to-implement way; and
the economic value of ontologies as artefacts in the
practice of knowledge management.
In particular, using the structuration-theory approach
(Giddens, 1984; Orlikowski, 1992; Orlikowski & Gash,
1994), the main features of the bidirectional method
should be analyzed, and the most important consequences
generated by using a special methodology (the bidirectional
method) should be unveiled. In particular, the
method facilitates the management of some activities
such as controlling the development of knowledge repositories
in a corporate knowledge-management system,
which may include a data warehouse, a corporate Web
portal, and intranet tools for accessing distributed data.
The major value of a systematic definition of these
aspects is the opportunity for measuring the quality of
an ontology from a social and organizational point of
view. Though the aim of this investigation is not so far to
obtain metrics and evaluation methods for ontologies,
we maintain that such a result is going to be shortly
available once the methods for building ontologies have
been defined.
An important observation is that we have three different
situations for ontology development at different
levels of difficulty: development from scratch, development
as a completion of an existing ontology, and
development as a merge (or coordination or alignment)
of several ontologies. The three cases require different
methodologies, and the methodology we have deployed
in this article is valid only for the first case. The other
two cases are also interesting extensions of the perspectives
of knowledge management we consider as the
focus of the article, and they deserve deep analysis.
However, we believe that this is possible only when
using a flexible methodology for the case from scratch.
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