miKrow: Semantic Intra-enterprise Micro-Knowledge Management System

Knowledge Management systems are one of the key strategies that allow companies to fully tap into their collective knowledge. However, two main entry barriers currently limit the potential of this approach: i) the hurdles employees encounter discouraging them from a strong and active participation (knowledge providing) and ii) the lack of truly evolved intelligent technologies that allow those employees to easily benefiting from the global knowledge provided by them and other users (knowledge consuming). Both needs can sometimes require opposite approaches, tending the current solutions to be not user friendly enough for user participation to be strong or not intelligent enough for them to be useful. In this paper, a lightweight framework for Knowledge Management is proposed based on the combination of two layers that cater to each need: a microblogging layer that simplifies how users interact with the whole system and a semantic powered engine that performs all the intelligent heavy lifting by combining semantic indexing and search of messages and users. Different mechanisms are also presented as extensions that can be plugged-in on demand and help expanding the capabilities of the whole system.