An Organisational Memory Information System using Ontologies

Resumo

In the recent years, much has been said about ontologies and their applications in different research fields. The ontological discipline emerged from artificial intelligence as a form of knowledge representation that would minimise the problems of knowledge sharing and reuse between people and between software. Apart from the view that portrays an ontology as a syntactic and semantic standardisation of knowledge structures, other approaches apply this discipline as a means to represent informal and semi-formal data structures. This paper presents ontologies as a design approach to represent organisational knowledge and ultimately to create an Organisational Memory Information System. This approach acknowledges the dynamics of the organizational environments, wherein the traditional design of information systems does not cope adequately with these organizational aspects. Knowledge management practices within the organizations, and the role of domain modelling with ontologies are also discussed in this paper.