The quality of knowledge: Knowledge patterns and knowledge refactorings

Knowledge management is a relatively young discipline. Nevertheless, it has accumulated a valuable body-of-knowledge in the structuring of knowledge and in the design of socio-technical knowledge management systems. However, concepts to describe common, recurring patterns of how to describe, structure, interrelate, group, or manage knowledge elements are still missing. In this paper, we introduce the concepts "knowledge pattern" and "knowledge anti-pattern" to describe best and worst practices in knowledge management, "knowledge refactoring" to improve or change knowledge anti-patterns, and "quality of knowledge" to describe desirable characteristics of knowledge in knowledge management systems. The concepts are transferred from software engineering to the field of knowledge management based on our experience from several knowledge management projects