Concept lattices for knowledge management

The aim of the method presented in this paper is to support the acquisition of new knowledge and to enhance the interactions between knowledge workers. The approach chosen is to facilitate the sharing of those retrieval terms, which members of a community of practice have used to retrieve valuable information. The nature of information-seeking behaviour in on-line information sources is discussed and then the theory of formal concept analysis is introduced. It is subsequently shown how this theory can be applied to analyse the relations between documents and the retrieval terms that people use to access these documents. The result is a concept lattice that contains information on a community's information-seeking behaviour. The concept lattice uncovers relational and contextual information. Retrieval phrases are ut into relational context depending on how they are associated by the documents that are of interest to a community of users. The contention made here is that such 'usage-based' structures will provide natural and intuitive access to information sources for communities of users. It is shown how this approach can be used to facilitate the sharing of the retrieval vocabulary to support the acquisition of new knowledge and to enhance the interactions within a community of practice.