An Ontology of Organizational Memory

This chapter presents KnowledgeEco, a domain ontology for organizational memory (OM). Based on extant theories of the domain, KnowledgeEco defines static and dynamic aspects of OM as a basis for formulating an evaluation framework, which can be used by organizations irrespective of their specific field. A key innovation in the KnowledgeEco ontology is the introduction of the concept of structural memory (SM). SM aggregates Type, which defines types of organizational memory, and Component, which aggregates Content (i.e., Knowledge Resource and Meta-Knowledge) and Means (i.e., Agent and Process) that manage the SM content. We demonstrate the considerations of ontology conceptualization in two stages of developing KnowledgeEco. The first is analysis and structuring of the ontology and the second is the assessment of its conceptual coverage. For researchers, KnowledgeEco provides a model that can be used in the evaluation of OM. For practitioners, the ontology offers a unified framework of objects and processes that need to be considered in the design of OM.