P2P knowledge management: an investigation of the technical architecture and main process

This paper presents the architecture of peer-to-peer (P2P) management of knowledge artifacts based on a distributed ontology. We analyze the main processes of knowledge management (KM), namely, knowledge acquisition and knowledge retrieval. P2P information management and ontologies yield significant advantages when combined and applied as advanced Web application for KM: (1) the knowledge owner (called knowledge peer) keeps control of his/her ontologies and knowledge artifacts against other knowledge peers, (2) corporations benefit because valuable knowledge will spread among knowledge peers due to P2P properties and thus will not be lost even if particular individuals leave the corporation.