Combining Ontologies and Peer-to-Peer Technologies for Inter-Organizational Knowledge Management

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to review the characteristics of systems that combine P2P technology with explicit ontologies and assess the benefits of these technologies for inter‐organizational knowledge management.Design/methodology/approach – We characterize existing technologies with respect to a number of aspects that are relevant to knowledge management on a technical level. We further provide an example of an existing system and categorize it according to the aspects.Findings – We conclude that ontology‐based P2P systems are in general beneficial for distributed knowledge management systems and that the design of such systems can be guided using the aspects we distinguish.Originality/value – The paper presents the first attempt to rigorously identify and discuss the design space of ontology‐based P2P systems.

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