Ontologies as Strategy to Represent Knowledge Audit Outcomes

Normally, after applying a knowledge audit methodology, the results are presented in a final report including knowledge inventory, knowledge maps, and knowledge flows. After analyzed the inventory, maps and flows, it is possible to identify inefficiencies reflected in duplication of efforts, knowledge gaps, knowledge barriers and knowledge-bottlenecks. All this information is integrated at the final report and is presented to managers, including diverse knowledge management initiatives. The main problems of representing the knowledge audit results only in this way, are the inefficiency of searching specific information about a knowledge asset; and difficulty of reuse them if a technological solution is needed as a part of a knowledge management initiative. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of using ontologies as a strategy to represent formally knowledge audit results to solve the previous problems and additionally obtain the next benefits: A support tool to detect problems/opportunities found in the organization to improve knowledge management; the results of the audit can be reused if a technological solution is needed; as a source of reference to know what, where, characteristics, classification and value of any assets of knowledge; as a form to represent the flow and its relation with the rest of assets; an efficient way to retrieve information from the inventory and/or flows of knowledge and automatically to know the impact and relation with the rest of the knowledge assets.