Knowledge Management for Virtual Education Through Ontologies

Current knowledge management focuses on knowledge acquisition, storage, retrieval and maintenance. E-Learning systems technology today is used primarily for training courses about carefully selected topics to be delivered to students registered for those courses. Knowledge management is used to rapidly capture, organize and deliver large amounts of corporate knowledge. The practice of adding value to information by capturing tacit knowledge and converting it into explicit knowledge is known as Knowledge Management. Ontologies can represent an existing knowledge from a domain, in this work; ontologies allow to model different aspects of knowledge management for virtual education in higher education. Universities, from the perspective of knowledge management, provide an updated concept of higher education where knowledge is considered a product, and the customers are students. This paper explains an ontological framework, used to model and integrate knowledge management processes and technological architecture for knowledge management in virtual education.