Some Considerations Concerning Organising and Retrieving Knowledge
by
Mariana Neagu
Transilvania University of Brasov, Department of Computer Science

One side effect of computerisation is the large amount of data collected in various organisations. Evidently there is a lot of useless information but, if one analyses the content there is also a lot of precious knowledge for decision support.

Each organisation has gathered knowledge in the form of databases, electronic or paper documents, etc. From the business perspective some of the information contained by these entities constitutes the know-how of the organisation. The same knowledge is considered , from the knowledge management modelling perspective, a huge unorganised repository of know-how, golas, internal procedures, etc. called by some authors the organisational memory or the corporate memory.

One of the most important issues, when organising knowledge, is to determine the important necessary knowledge that leads to an improvement in the activity of the organisation. Therefore the aims of organising knowledge must be very well defined in terms of the people who need, as decision support, knowledge.

In the latest period, many organisations are preoccupied with elaborating applications in Knowledge Management area. Usualy a KM System is a symmetric immage of the organisation in terms of its knowledge. Regardless of the application power and complexity, the human factor is not eliminated, but rather it is included more than ever. Keeping the data up-to-date and taking precautions to eliminate the info-smog are only two of the areas in which the human factor must be present all the time.

Date received: March 13, 2000

Copyright © 2000 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # caet-34.