Preface for the Third Edition - Read

374 B. Concepts and Theories
Knowledge management systems might also be viewed as important organizational
assets that provide core competencies for the organization. Especially highly
knowledge-intensive organizations might view the systematic handling of knowledge
in general and their ICT systems supporting KM in particular as their core
competence and fear that they might loose a strategic advantage if they implement
a standard software solution available on the market.
Most organizations that actually have implemented KMS solutions supposedly
have combined several tools and implemented additional functions on their own
rather than simply buying specialized KMS software on the market. This leads to
the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 20: The majority of organizations apply organization-specific KMS
developments or a combination of organization-specific developments
and KMS tools rather than just KMS available on the market.
7.7 Semantic integration
Data and knowledge elements in the data and knowledge source layer typically are
scattered across a variety of application systems, e.g., collaboration systems, content
management systems, document management systems, file systems and other
enterprise systems. Integration of data has been a concern for many years. Relational
data base management has unified the way (transactional) data is handled in
organizations. The organization of structured, transactional data has been wellunderstood
for years. However, the amount of semi-structured and unstructured
data, such as (text) documents, messages, images, media files or Web content has
grown substantially and needs to be integrated as well. The integration of these
data sources requires other approaches. In addition to data integration, semantic
integration provides standards and technologies to integrate knowledge elements
from different systems on the conceptual level. Thus, it is not data or Web
resources alone that are brokered from system to system, but meta-data about its
semantics, its relationships, “meaning” and context. Many of these standards and
technologies build on XML.
This section addresses the core integration layer of a KMS 575 that provides
access to the heterogeneous data and knowledge sources of an organization in a
semantically integrated way, so that knowledge services can be built on top. The
integration layer consists on the one hand of function-oriented integration services
(function and process integration) and on the other hand of data-oriented integration
services (data, user and semantic integration). Data-oriented integration services
are the focus of this section. The electronic resources mainly used in knowledge-intensive
processes in organizations are semi-structured documents which
575. See sections 7.4.1 - “Overview” on page 319 and 7.4.2 - “Infrastructure and integration
services” on page 322.