Hello,
 
I'm doing some work on knowledge mapping at the moment. I am aware of the APQC's publications on this topic. However I'm interested in getting a sense of the techniques that people are using currently.
 
What I would like to do is get some qualitative feedback from people on the lists then I may set up a short survey about usage & attitudes and publish the results back to the groups. If someone has done this already then I will simply copy what they have done and not reinvent the wheel, etc, etc.
 
First of all, how do people out there define a knowledge map? For me, it's any graphical representation of knowledge in an organisation. And because knowledge is complex, mulit-facted thing, this means that knowledge maps can take many forms. Knowledge maps are all about understanding what you have, they are often developed collectively to generate a shared understanding of knowledge, they can be used to communicate issues to other stakeholders.
 
HOW DO YOU DEFINE A KNOWLEDGE MAP? WHAT IS IT FOR? WHAT SHOULD BE IN ONE?
 
The most common forms that I have seen are:
- Business process mapping
- Content audits/inventories - that list either individual content items or groups of content items along with notes around purpose, audience, ownership, etc.
- Skills inventories - that break out different skills by individual or even group.
- Social network analysis - that displays the relationships
- Concept maps & topic maps that display relationships between concepts or entities (and here we start moving into ontologies)
They don't have to be these - a memorable example of a knowledge map was produced by a market research company for new starters as a game of snakes & ladders.
 
WHAT OTHER MAPS HAVE YOU COME ACROSS THAT YOU'D CALL A KNOWLEDGE MAP?
 
Any contributions much appreciated.
 
Matt