On the ontological aspects of knowledge management

Over time three generations of Knowledge Management have been identified. With phenomenal advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) the adoption of Knowledge Management in organisations is growing rapidly. At the same time the ontology of an organisation in view of Knowledge Managers is changing too. Several ontological perspectives have been proposed in the past, but we believe none of them is complete. The incompleteness is because of the ambiguous definition of knowledge. This paper revisits various definitions of knowledge, and defines knowledge as information rationalised through reflection, learning and logical reasoning. Finally, a model that can be easily adopted by any organisation in defining its ontology is presented. In this model, observations and wisdom are subjective and data, information and knowledge are objective