
## 2.1.1 Types Of Knowledge

Knowledge is classified into explicit or theoretical and tacit or practical knowledge (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). Explicit knowledge could be expressed in form of theoretical and practical experience. It could be readily transmitted across individuals formally and systematically. On the other hand, tacit knowledge is in form of skill and it is highly personal and hard to formalize, thus, difficult to share with others. There is need to transform tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge in order to represent it in a way to aid its exploitation in a knowledge management system.

## 2.2 Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management (KM) is considered as a tool for competitive advantage and innovation for an organization, institution, industry or government. KM focuses on both theoretical and practical know-how of groups of people in an organization. There are diverse definitions of KM.

It is defined as a continuous process of knowledge explicitation and internalization (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). In addition, KM refers to a global process in the enterprise, which includes all the processes that allow capitalization of knowledge capital of the firm. It focuses on the uderstanding, supporting, optimizing and accelerating those processes, in coherence and cross-fertilization in order to aid the prediction of future events from the knowledge of the past and present events, that is, "to know where you are and where you come from to better know where you go" (Dieng-Kuntz & Matta, 2002). Succinctly, KM implies the explicit and systematic management of vital knowledge - and its associated processes of creation, organization, diffusion, use and exploitation (Skyrme, 1998). We refer to KM as the process of conscious co-ordination of knowledge - skills, expertise, procedures, etc.; in order to store, organize and exploit it for innovation and optimization of organizational goals.

Consequently, the major requirements of KM are creation, acquisition, organization, storage and exploitation of knowledge. We consider the effective principles of knowledge representation and capitalization with respect to the highlighted criteria below.

. Co-operative knowledge acquisition or elicitation between KM system developer and domain actors.

User-centered representation format for presentation of system result to users.

A
A
Adequate knowledge retrieval method which supports ease of system use and access to relevant and reliable knowledge by users.

A
System flexibility to support evolution of KM system.

Adequate method of evaluation or assessment of a knowledge repository in order to improve its efficiency and adequacy.

A
KM usually involves the development of knowledge repository generally called corporate or organizational memory. Corporate memory (CM)
refers to a structured set of knowledge related to the firm experience in a given domain (Simon, 1996). It is also a "repository of knowledge and know-how of a set of individuals working in particular firm" (Euzenat, 1996). In building a CM, it is essential to identify the crucial expert or domain knowledge in order to determine the required kind of CM that would "support the integration of resources and know-how in the enterprise and the co-operation by effective communication and active documentation" (Durstewiz, 1994). Some examples of methodologies for developing CM are Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) approach, Ontology, corporate Semantic Webs, agent-based approach etc. CM can be in form of knowledge-based, document-based, workflow-based, and distributed Organizational Memory systems (Dieng, et al., 1998). KM is applicable to EI
since it serves as a mean of organization, conservation, and transmission of existing knowledge in EI projects. There are several application areas where KM has been implemented as an innovation key. We briefly consider some of these systems.