Have you ever wondered how people managed to get things done in their jobs in the days of the pen and the typewriter? Ever since in the 1980s computers entered the individual’s workplace on a large scale, and even more so since they got hooked up to the Internet in the 1990s, working without computers has become almost unthinkable.

As a side effect, knowledge has become “measurable”: by the amount of data in- and output, by the number of words, figures, documents, media and log files generated and processed by the employees, who were suddenly known as knowledge workers.  Parallel to the expansion of the so-called knowledge-intensive industries, the fear arose that knowledge might be lost through mismanagement: Data that are merely stored, but not used, are dead – only data that are used, exploited and circulated can transform into knowledge.

The KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki project proposes to approach knowledge management from a fresh perspective by combining it with, on the one hand, the wiki philosophy and, on the other, the methods of the Semantic Web. The one has revolutionized our notion of knowledge (and of who controls it) over the past five years, the other one is going to fundamentally transform our practice of knowledge sharing across all platforms in the years to come.

To put it in a nutshell: KiWi aims for a vision and a first glimpse of the future of collaborative knowledge management by developing a prototype of a running knowledge management system that is as easy to use as a wiki, and backed by the intelligence of the Semantic Web. Sounds like a good idea – but how is this to be achieved?

Please follow us on a short excursion through the present challenges of knowledge management, the solutions the wiki way of collaboration has to offer and through the promises of the Semantic Web.

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The Rules of Good Knowledge Management: People and Collaboration First