Examples of Knowledge Management Tools
A classification of types of knowledge management tools illustrating the difference between scientific content management systems and other types of internet sites.
Class of Tool | Description | Links |
Knowledge maps | Establish a classification scheme called a taxonomy of knowledge, provide a frame of reference for many knowledge management products, and serve as a critical first step for identifying available knowledge. | forest.cse.ogi.edu/portal |
Electronic yellow-page directories | Aid in finding hard-to-access tacit knowledge resources by providing access to experts. They also organize existing web sites and serve up a variety of explicit knowledge assets in understandable ways. | |
Apprenticeship programs | Are typically one-on-one type relationships where an expert coaches a less experience person in various forms. | |
Communities of practice | Support groups of individuals with similar work responsibilities but who are not part of a formally designated work team. Many communities of practice communicate through a web-based system. | |
Best practices and lessons learned | Typically present the situation, the options, choices taken, and the results for a typical decision problem. They are widely used in natural resource management and can be extensively found on the internet. | www.kyphilom.com/www/wood/bmp.html |
Lectures and story telling | Allow people to gain more understanding and have greater recall then they do from written reports. Stories can be used to capture lectures on a particular topic, to capture after action reports, to record difficult to codify tacit knowledge, and for many other purposes. Web-based software systems exist that support this knowledge management tool. | www.fsl.orst.edu/geowater/morphology/ |
Frequently asked questions | In the course of performing a job, people naturally identify questions that their coworkers or their clients ask repeatedly. It is worthwhile to document and develop useful and standardized answers for these types of repetitive questions. Web-based systems also exist that specialize in the management of these questions. | |
Web-based learning | Allows to translate a typical classroom experience to an online media to offer students the oportunity to learn codified knowledge in a structure way at their own pace. | www.forestandrange.org |
Scientific content management sites | Collects knowledge in some kind of web-based content management system. First, the knowledge has to be found, organized, synthesized, reviewed for quality, and uploaded for availability. Second, the knowledge content has to be updated and maintained so it keeps its currency. Software systems exist that support both of these functions. | forestencyclopedia.net |
Simulation models | Are a popular way to organize specific problem solving knowledge and provide precise, quantitative answers to guide natural resource managers. Most such models have not yet been converted to execute over the internet, however, many simulation models can be downloaded from the internet and then executed on a stand-alone computer. | www.fs.fed.us/fmsc/fvs/ |
Free-content information collaboratories | Create and distribute free information content, e.g., encyclopedia. Articles are edited by volunteers and are subject to change by nearly anyone. They cover a wide range of topics, but lack the authority of traditional materials and lack the chance of a quality control regarding the content. | wikipedia.org |
Timemaps | A visual-matrix index of the events, research topics, people, and publications, organized by time, for a specific area. An electronic zoomable canvas allows embedding a large amount of information in a single plane. | www.fsl.orst.edu/geowater/timemaps/lter/ |
Databases | A common way to organize original source material in a database structure. It is irrelevant whether the data is numeric or graphic or computer files. Web-based methods have been developed to manage database online. | |
Library services | Managing and making accessible published books and scientific journal articles has long been the province of science libraries. These services are also available on the internet either free of charge. | |
Online scientific journals | More and more scientific journals have placed all or part of the content of their original research articles online. Search engines allow to find relevant articels and the number of citations refering to them. | www.scirus.com |
Web portals | Provide links to many other sites that can either be accessed directly or can be found by following an organized sequence of related categories. The provider of a web portal is responsible for structuring and filtering of web-addresses relating to a special theme. | frames.nbii.gov |
