Ontology Network for Social Network Analysis in a Knowledge Management Context

Abstract

Organizational knowledge is one of the most valuable assets that companies own today. For several decades organizations have been developing strategies to manage knowledge with particular emphasis on tacit knowledge discovery. The particular dynamic that presents the evolution and transfer of tacit knowledge is closely tied to the relations between people. For this reason, Social Network Analysis (SNA) can be a powerful tool to support a Knowledge Management (KM) initiative. Despite usefulness recognition of SNA techniques within KM processes, there is still remains the initial problem of data collection and representation (problem shared by both initiatives). The aim of this paper is to analyze an ontology network usefulness to obtain the necessary knowledge structure to feed the SNA-KM integration architecture proposed.