The Knowledge Management Lab
University of Toronto

The Knowledge Management Lab at the University of Toronto is a research group focusing on concepts, methods, and technologies supporting the management of knowledge. These include the representation, organization, acquisition, creation, usage, and evolution of knowledge in its many forms, and the modelling, analysis, and design of technical systems for supporting all facets of knowledge management.

An assortment of techniques for representing and managing codified knowledge has emerged from a number of areas in Computer Science (CS), notably Artificial Intelligence, Databases, Software Engineering, and Information Systems. Although there is no consensus on a notion of knowledge or knowledge-based processing in CS, the terms are used usually in contra-distinction with data or data processing, to highlight the needs

• to clarify the relationship between symbols stored in computers and what they represent in the world outside,
• to dissociate the manipulation of such symbolic representations from internal computer processing,
• to explicitly and formally deal with the semantics of such representations and manipulations, and
• to make effective use of meta-descriptions in treating these symbols and structures.

This movement towards knowledge orientation, though not always refered to in such terms or viewed as a coherent movement, has been occuring over the past 15 to 20 years in CS. From a practical standpoint, the growing complexity of application domains, of software development, and of intertwining machine and human processes may all have contributed to the recognition of such needs and the development of techniques to address them. However, the movement has also been motivated by the search for firmer foundations in the various computing disciplines (e.g., [Newell80] [Bubenko80] [Ullman88]).

Our group, taking into account the contributions of many alumni, has actively participated in these developments. Our group aims to continue such contributions. Our current focus, however, is to broaden our horizon to deal not only with the treatment of formally represented, computer-stored knowledge, but, in recognizing the limitations of current techniques, to further develop them within the usage context of human, organizational, and social processes.

Designed and maintained by Greg Lapouchnian.