An Ontology-based Knowledge Management System for Industry Clusters

TL;DR

This paper proposes an ontology-based knowledge management system to enhance knowledge sharing and collaboration within industry clusters, using a knowledge engineering approach demonstrated through a Thai handicraft cluster case study.

Contribution

It introduces a methodology for creating and representing ontologies to support organizational development in industry clusters.

Findings

Improved knowledge sharing in the cluster

Faster knowledge-base development

Explicit knowledge representation

Abstract

Knowledge-based economy forces companies in the nation to group together as a cluster in order to maintain their competitiveness in the world market. The cluster development relies on two key success factors which are knowledge sharing and collaboration between the actors in the cluster. Thus, our study tries to propose knowledge management system to support knowledge management activities within the cluster. To achieve the objectives of this study, ontology takes a very important role in knowledge management process in various ways; such as building reusable and faster knowledge-bases, better way for representing the knowledge explicitly. However, creating and representing ontology create difficulties to organization due to the ambiguity and unstructured of source of knowledge. Therefore, the objectives of this paper are to propose the methodology to create and represent ontology for the organization development by using knowledge engineering approach. The handicraft cluster in Thailand is used as a case study to illustrate our proposed methodology.