A Reference Architecture for an Enterprise Knowledge Infrastructure

With the emergence of social media, data available for market analytics has grown significantly, especially in the context of product lifecycle value analysis. Existing architecture frameworks do not support knowledge management, required to process massive amount of market data, or 'big data'. In order to perform product lifecycle value analysis, product managers need to access, in a seamless manner, data from several domains from systems within the organization and from external sources such as social media, government and industry sites, to name a few. The structured and integrated data must then be transformed into information, or contextualized data, and ultimately into actionable information or knowledge. To achieve this objective, this paper proposes an innovative approach, the Reference Architecture of an Enterprise Knowledge Infrastructure (RA-EKI) that provides a holistic approach to manage the complete knowledge lifecycle.