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Volume 5 Issue 2, May 2007
Comparison of Approaches toward Formalizing Context: Implementation Characteristics and Capacities
William Loyola
Escuela de Postgrado en Administración de Empresas - ESPAE de la Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral - ESPOL - Guayaquil, Ecuador
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This paper takes the challenge to elaborate on conceptual specificity that allows the understanding and formalization of common knowledge types referred by knowledge-based theory of the firm. In this endeavor, it is essential to achieve a characterization of the domain in regards to which "common knowledge" is common. This domain is identified as the organizational context and it is found that context definition has been admitted as a tacit issue but without adequate explanation. Existing relevant literature regarding approaches to context formalization is compare and analyze. Among the reviewed models, the Ontological model, given its structure (guidelines for context taxonomies), context content (procedures of definition) and capacity to handle all common knowledge types, was the selected approach to elaborate on.
Furthermore, the boundary object concept with its data-information-knowledge continuum approach reveals first, an extensive description of context as a subset related to the syntactic-semantic-pragmatic continuum; and second, a continuum human involvement dependence: data and perceived context are related to discrimination capacity, information and contextual information are related to inference, and knowledge and contextual knowledge are related to judgment and action.
Both the ontological and the context continuum approach allows us to posit that: 1) organizational common language is a syntactic issue that asks for the articulation and sharing of the what, who, when, where of organizational repertories, 2) organizational shared meanings is a semantic issue that asks for: a) propositions that relate the topics of organizational taxonomies, and b) the identification of the occurrences of practice experiences linked to the terms that participate in such association; 3) recognition of individual knowledge domains is a syntactic and semantic issue; it is related to who knows what. Finally, 4) integration of knowledge in products and services is a pragmatic issue mainly assisted by contextual knowledge.
Keywords:
knowledge integration, common knowledge, context formalization
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