A Meta-Model for Knowledge Management

Knowledge management has come of age now. A number of approaches has been developed, described and (partly) implemented. Important ones are the classic approach focussed on knowledge assets, the process-oriented approach, the knowledge-intensive business process modeling approach, and the communities of practice. Each, approach has its benefits and its scope of applicability, but also its shortcomings and restrictions. In order to gain a general and systematic insight into the variety of knowledge management approaches, a meta-model for knowledge management is proposed in this paper. In general a meta-model abstracts essential entities of a domain of interest and their interrelations. Concrete models can then be derived from it by a process of instantiation of parts or the whole of it. Here concrete knowledge management models can be derived from the meta-model. The description power of the meta-model is provided by six essential entities related to knowledge management (namely: process, person, explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge, topic, and document) and appropriate interconnections between them. The meta-model can be described as a fully connected graph with self-connecting edges at each node. From this description of the meta-model, concrete models can be gained easily by first restricting to subgraphs graph and then instantiating the remaining nodes and edges appropriately. In this paper we describe each known knowledge management model by following this procedure of restricting and instantiating the meta-model. Furthermore, by taking the full graph of the meta-model as model base, we are able to propose a new integrated approach to knowledge management. It is process-oriented and reflects the important contributions of different kinds of knowledge (i.e. explicit and tacit knowledge). The well-known atomic knowledge conversions (socialisation, externalisation, combination, internalisation) and more general knowledge conversions between the knowledge types are considered. Furthermode the human roles as single persons as well as communities of practice in the enterprise are taken into account. The derivation of each knowledge management approach from a common meta-model makes it possible to relate the approaches to each other in a systematic way, dependent on the usage of parts or all of the six main entities and interrelations for knowledge management. In this sense a decision base for the model of choice is gained for an organisation having its specific constraints and requirements.