ReviewOntologies application in organizational learning: A literature review
Highlights
► Literature review related to the ontologies application in organizational learning. ► Balance between the use of lightweight and heavyweight ontologies. ► Higher concentration of application ontologies.
Introduction
Learning has become a crucial factor for the organizations to obtain competitive and sustainable advantages in the last decades (Schein, 1996, Senge, 2000, Stata, 1989). It is through it that the organizations reach an environment that stimulates innovation and improvement and they are also capable of responding to the changes demanded by the world of competition (Murray & Donegan, 2003). In this context, two concepts have been discussed in literature, and these two refer to organizational learning (OL) and learning organization (LO). Both concepts are considered complementary because there is not a clear distinction between the two (Finger and Buergin, 1998, Lahteenmaki et al., 2001).
OL is a process where organizations retain the knowledge that is located in the minds of its members and/or in the epistemological artifacts (maps, memories, policies, strategies and programs) and integrates it to the organizational environment (Argyris and Schon, 1996, Stata, 1989). In this approach, knowledge is considered as part of the organization and it is represented as procedures and rules (Sicilia & Lytras, 2005). LO is the ideal situation, to which the organizations must evolve in order to reach continuous learning (Finger & Buergin, 1998) and it is characterized by behavior changes in the organization as a result of learning (Reynolds & Ablett, 1998). LO presents a more modern approach, however, the concept of OL is still the most used to describe learning in organizations.
Nevertheless, there are still barriers impeding learning from happening and thus obstructing companies from getting sustainable competitive advantages. Among these barriers, one can point out communication deficiency, difficulty in the conversion from tacit to explicit knowledge and the lack of knowledge management (Riege, 2005, Schilling and Kluge, 2009, Von Zedtwitz, 2002).
As a tentative to reduce or eliminate these barriers, the Information Technology (IT) can be an allied. IT solutions such as e-mails, chats, blogs, collaborative systems, among others, can be implemented in order to obtain good results in this context, since they contribute for an improvement in communication among the people and help elucidating knowledge. However, for some issues, such as, adequate knowledge structure and mechanisms that makes its retrieval easier, certain types of IT should be applied in conjunction, so that a higher level of “intelligence” is offered in order to achieve more satisfactory results. In this sense, the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has conducted research in developing computational systems that incorporate knowledge on a given domain, allowing inferences, reasoning and decision making. These systems keep an explicit and symbolic representation of knowledge. Such representation has an advantage of being separated from the procedure aspects related to application, and it can be reused by other systems. In order to fulfill this task, it is necessary to organize knowledge in a formal way and make it available in a standard language, so that it can be shared, because computers are essentially machines processing symbols and need clear instructions on how to manipulate these symbols in a meaningful way (Cimiano, 2006).
In this context, ontology has a main role: it allows formal vocabularies that describe basic premises of a given domain; it gives a shared conceptualization expressed in a formal logic; it makes communication among people and computational agents easier; it promotes interoperability among organizational systems; and it can also be used by computational agents in order to act replacing human beings in processes or distributing tasks.
The most widespread definition of ontology is “an explicit specification of a conceptualization” (Gruber, 1995). This definition has been complemented by Studer, Benjamins, and Fensel (1998) as “ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization”. According to Studer et al.’s definition (1998), “shared” means that an ontology should capture the consensual knowledge, and “formal” refers to the fact that ontology should be declaratively defined, read and interpreted by machines.
Processing information using ontologies, that provide an excellent context for understanding the information for both human users and for software agents, is becoming a trend in several areas and types of application (Musen, 2002). The motivation for the development of ontologies can be found in many applications and through the benefits obtained by its use.
There is a high interest in the construction of ontologies, however, there is not a lot of work developed in this area and it has not been used widely yet. In the organizational learning context, where their development and application are notably relevant, ontologies have not been used so much. Some reasons for this may be: time, cost and the resources used for their development.
In this context, the objective of this paper is to explore how ontologies are being applied in this process. There are some questions that are still unanswered:
- 1.
What types of ontologies are being applied in the organizational learning process?
- 2.
What are the types of IT applied in conjunction with ontology in the context of organizational learning?
- 3.
What are the ways ontologies and IT can facilitate the organizational learning?
The remaining sections of this paper are organized as follows: Section 2 presents the theoretical basis for organizational learning, learning organization, Information Technology and ontologies. Section 3 describes the research method. The results are presented in Section 4 and the discussion in Section 5. Section 6 concludes this paper.
Section snippets
Literature review
This section presents a theoretical background of the main concepts that are objects of this study. The first subsection describes the main concepts related to organizational learning and learning organization. While these concepts have some differences, both have been treated in literature as being complementary with regards to learning in organizations. Thus, the two concepts were considered in the search of this material. The second subsection describes concepts related to IT and more
Methods
The research method used is a systematic revision, through which it is intended to identify, evaluate and interpret the possible and relevant researches for a given issue (Kitchenham, 2004). For the conduction of this review, the subsequent stages were followed: revision planning, research identification, primary studies selection and classification.
Results
This section presents the results obtained after the papers classification. Table 3 summarizes this classification, according to the structure complexity, level of ontology contents and types of IT that have been applied in conjunction with ontologies. The way ontologies and IT facilitate learning has been discussed as well.
Discussion
Due to the importance of knowledge to learning in organizations and the difficulties faced to have this knowledge spread and shared, this paper’s objective was to identify the solutions which are being applied as conductors or facilitators in the acquisition process, shared understanding and knowledge transfer, so that an ongoing improvement may be reached by the organizations.
Barriers impeding organizational learning from happening exist. However, this research points out papers that are being
Conclusion
The objective of this systematic review was to answer the following questions: (1) What types of ontologies are being applied in the organizational learning process?; (2) What are the types of IT applied in conjunction with ontology in the context of organizational learning?; and (3) What are the ways ontologies and IT can facilitate the organizational learning?
Regarding the first question, when type of structure is evaluated, there is a balance between the use of lightweight and heavyweight
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