Methodologies for Building a Knowledge Map: A Literature Survey

Nowadays one of the most important phenomenons in organizations is their ability to make the available knowledge internally visible in a formal way. Most organizations are facing difficulty in making important knowledge visible as part of their knowledge management effort. Knowledge maps make it easier to locate this knowledge, capture it and make it visible for the organization. Several methodologies have been proposed and presented for building a knowledge map. Despite this, discussion on those methodologies in the literature is very little. Thus, the goal of this study is to carry out a literature survey to determine all the existing methodologies used for building a knowledge map, then cross-referencing those methodologies with the five types of knowledge map. Practitioners and researchers involved with knowledge maps may find this study useful as it provides a wide description of those methodologies and assesses their degree of contrast. The fact that this study is the first literature survey of methodologies used to build knowledge maps makes it a significant contribution to the Knowledge Management (KM) community.