The transformation and search of semi‐structured knowledge in organizations

Knowledge is perceived as very important asset for organizations and knowledge management is critical for organization competitiveness. Because the nature of knowledge is always represented as complex and varied, it is difficult to extend effectiveness of knowledge re‐use in organizations. In this article, an approach based on the Zachman’s Framework to externalize organizational knowledge into semi‐structured knowledge is developed, and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is applied to transform the knowledge into documents. In addition, latent semantic indexing (LSI), which is capable of solving problems of synonyms and antonyms, as well as improving accuracy of document searches, is incorporated to facilitate search of semi‐structured knowledge (SSK) documents based on user demands. The SSK approach shows great promise for organizations to acquire, store, disseminate, and reuse knowledge.