Organizations’ Interpersonal Activity Knowledge Representation

Abstract

Knowledge is essential for organizations’ growth as it allows them to solve problems, make decisions, innovate, and stay competitive. Within organizations, there is, on the one hand, explicit knowledge that is easy to capture, represent, and share. On the other hand, there is tacit knowledge possessed and acquired by individuals during their activities. Unlike explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge is difficult to capture and formalize. Organizations have granted more interest and efforts in representing, sharing, and reasoning from explicit knowledge. However, for tacit personal knowledge, they rely on methods such as meetings, mentoring, questions answering, or interviews which are limited in capitalizing on personal knowledge. This study elaborates on the construction of interpersonal activity graphs for representing, sharing, and reasoning on organizations’ tacit knowledge possessed by individuals. The established graph is based on an extended activity theory framework and an ontology for common semantics. The proposed representation captures tacit knowledge in a graph form, making it shareable while offering means to reason and query it.