Narrow Results

Ontologies are widely used to represent knowledge explicitly but it is impractical to expect all individuals and organisations to agree on using one or a small subset of ontologies. The adoption of multiple ontologies causes ontology mismatches which make their inherent vocabularies and relationships become inconsistent, resulting in difficulty for one system to understand and reuse these ontologies. To achieve knowledge sharing and reuse, ontology mediation is required to reconcile mismatches between heterogeneous ontologies. In this paper, we investigate the application of ontology in knowledge management (KM). Many KM approaches have been developed with the purpose of managing organisational knowledge. However, these approaches only focus on managing intra-organisational knowledge, which is inadequate in current business environment because users are often required to access inter-organisational knowledge to complete their tasks. These approaches also fail to collaborate with each other as their designs are based on their own business and KM requirement in managing organisational knowledge. We argue that ontology and its mediation methods can be used to overcome limitation of non-collaborative problem in which individual organisation is unable to reuse inter-organisational knowledge. An ontology-based inter-organisational KM network is therefore proposed to allow organisations accessing and retrieving inter-organisational knowledge of common domain.

This study aims to identify the strategic roles of competitive intelligence and to examine the mediating effect of competitive intelligence practices on the relationship between perceived strategic uncertainty and firm performance. Data are collected from 123 public listed companies in Malaysia using mail questionnaire survey. The study highlights the essential role of competitive intelligence in supporting strategic decision making and strategic planning as well as in identifying opportunities and threats. Results reveal that perceived strategic uncertainty relates positively to competitive intelligence practices, which in turn, relates positively to firm performance. This paper includes implications, limitations, and recommendations for future studies.

Based on extensive exploration in Chinese classics, this paper finds a fresh new perspective for KM philosophy especially in pyramid issue: The primary role in knowledge ontology should be consciousness rather than IT aspects, in which the former determines the perceived results such as data, information, knowledge or wisdom. With this domination, this paper presents a novel hierarchy that best solves the quarrel in classic pyramid, and illustrates the crucial issue of wisdom — the finding of a continuous birth and death metabolic cyclic nature called anitya in knowledge. Further, a three layer wisdom hierarchy is suggested based on different levels of understandings: traditional layer, dialect layer and ultimate layer. This paper argues that wisdom should depend on internal concentration while IT serves as an exterior role and never replaces the inner one. Meanwhile, the paper also doubts the classic definition of knowledge and suggests a novel one.