Building a taxonomy for understanding knowledge management

As an interdisciplinary research field emerging recently, Knowledge Management (KM) has been given many different definitions. This paper introduces two studies we carried out to provide a holistic and better understanding of KM. By applying the methodology of domain analysis to investigate leading peer-reviewed journals regarding KM, the first study explores six fundamental issues regarding KM, which are: why is KM necessary; what enables the birth of KM and triggers actions on KM; what does KM deal with; how to implement KM; how to support KM by information technology; and where has KM been applied. By building an ontology structure of research topics within the community of the Graduate School of Knowledge Science at Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), the second study examines KM within a more general disciplinary called Knowledge Science, which gives a description of how KM is related to other research topics