Towards the new generation of web knowledge

Abstract

Purpose - As the web evolves its purpose and nature of its use are changing. The purpose of the paper is to investigate whether the web can provide for the competing stakeholders, who are similarly evolving and who increasingly see it as a significant part of their business. Design/methodology/approach - The paper adopts an exploratory and reviewing approach to the emerging trends and patterns emanating from the web's changing use and explores the underpinning technologies and tools that facilitate this use and access. It examines the future and potential of web-based knowledge management (KM) and reviews the emerging web trends, tools, and enabling technologies that will provide the infrastructure of the next generation web. Findings - The research carried out provides an independent framework for the capturing, accessing and distributing of web knowledge. This framework retains the semantic mark-up, a feature that we deem indispensable for the future of KM, employing web ontologies to structure organisational knowledge and semantic text processing for the extraction of knowledge from web sites. Practical implications - As a result it was possible to identify the implications of integrating the two aspects of web-based KM, namely the business-organisational-users' perspective and that of the enabling web technologies. Originality/value - The proposed framework accommodates the collaborative tools and services offered by Web 2.0, acknowledging the fact that knowledge-based systems are shared, dynamic, evolving resources, whose underlying knowledge model requires careful management due to its constant changing.