# An Ontology-Based Knowledge Management System For Industry Clusters

Pradorn Sureephong1, Nopasit Chakpitak1, Yacine Ouzrout2, Abdelaziz Bouras2 1Department of Knowledge Management, College of Arts, Media and Technology, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand. {dorn | nopasit}@camt.info 2LIESP, University Lumiere Lyon 2, Lyon, France, {yacine.ouzrout | abdelaziz.bouras}@univ-lyon2.fr 

## Abstract

Knowledge-based economy forces companies in every country to group together as a cluster in order to maintain their competitiveness in the world market. The cluster development relies on two key success factors which are knowledge sharing and collaboration between the actors in the cluster. Thus, our study tries to propose a knowledge management system to support knowledge management activities within the cluster. To achieve the objectives of the study, ontology takes a very important role in the knowledge management process in various ways; such as building reusable and faster knowledge-bases and better ways of representing the knowledge explicitly. However, creating and representing ontology creates difficulties to organization due to the ambiguity and unstructured nature of the source of knowledge. Therefore, the objectives of this paper are to propose the methodology to capture, create and represent ontology for organization development by using the knowledge engineering approach. The handicraft cluster in Thailand is used as a case study to illustrate our proposed methodology. 

Keywords: Ontology, Semantic, Knowledge Management System, Industry Cluster 

## 1.1 Introduction

In the past, the three production factors (Land, Labor and Capital) were abundant, accessible and were considered as the reason of economic advantage, knowledge did not get much attention [1]. Nowadays, it is the knowledge-based economy era which is affected by the increasing use of information technologies. Thus, previous production factors are currently no longer enough to sustain a firm's competitive advantage; knowledge is being called on to play a key role [2]. Most industries try to use available information to gain more competitive advantages than others. Knowledge-based economy is based on the production, distribution and use of knowledge and information [3]. The study of Yoong and Molina [1] assumed that one way of surviving in today's turbulent business environment for business organizations is to form strategic alliances or mergers with other similar or 