The Quality of Knowledge: Knowledge Patterns and Knowledge Refactorings

Knowledge management is a relatively young discipline. Nevertheless, it has accumulated a valuable body of knowledge in the structuring of knowledge and in the design of socio-technical knowledge management systems. However, concepts to describe common, recurring patterns of how to describe, structure, interrelate, group, or manage knowledge elements are still missing. In this article, we introduce the concepts “knowledge pattern” and “knowledge antipattern” to describe best and worst practices in knowledge management, “knowledge refactoring” to improve or change knowledge antipatterns, and “quality of knowledge” to describe desirable characteristics of knowledge in knowledge management systems. The concepts are transferred from software engineering to the field of knowledge management based on our experience from several knowledge management projects.