A framework for evaluating

knowledge-mapping tools
Samuel Driessen, Willem-Olaf Huijsen and Marjan Grootveld

Abstract
Purpose – This article describes the knowledge-mapping framework the authors designed based on
their theoretical and practical research on knowledge mapping. It also shows the practical use of the
Framework for companies interested in knowledge-mapping tools.
Design/methodology/approach – In the first place the authors position their research in the context of
knowledge management and knowledge-mapping research and practice. An example of their practical
research on knowledge mapping is given as a preliminary step to describe their knowledge-mapping
framework. The use of this framework is illustrated. Finally, the authors validate their framework against a
number of commercially available tools with knowledge-mapping functionality.
Findings – The authors found that their framework is useful, insightful and robust when applied to new
knowledge-mapping tools/functionality.
Research limitations/implications – The important issue how to embed knowledge-mapping tools in
organizations is not considered to be in the scope of this article.
Practical implications – Based on concrete examples the authors illustrate the practical implications of
Samuel Driessen is based their knowledge-mapping framework for companies. The Framework can be used for defining
knowledge-mapping tool requirements, the assessment and comparison of commercial tools, and the
at Océ-Technologies,
assessment of available knowledge in an organization.
Venlo, The Netherlands.
Originality/value – Knowledge mapping and its use have been a research issue for some time.
Willem-Olaf Huijsen and
Companies have also adopted knowledge-mapping tools to support and stimulate knowledge sharing
Marjan Grootvel are based
in their organizations and to help employees find the expertise they are looking for. But no research has
at the Telematica Instituut,
been done on how to help companies decide what kind of knowledge-mapping tool they need or how
Enschede, The Netherlands. any tools they already have can be combined in a knowledge-mapping tool. This article describes a
unique and new Framework the authors devised to help companies do just that.
Keywords Knowledge management, Knowledge mapping, Decision support systems
Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction
Over the years articles and papers have appeared about knowledge mapping and its use,
e.g. Wexler (2001); Eppler (2001); Huijsen et al. (2004b). Not too many papers have been
written on how you actually build a knowledge-mapping tool and, most importantly, on how
to embed this tool in your organization. Least of all, papers have been written on how a
company decides what kind of knowledge-mapping tool it wants or needs. This issue is the
topic of this article, because there are many kinds of knowledge-mapping tools. Essentially,
however, they can be summarized in one clear framework. The purpose of this article is to
present such a framework and show its use in practice. This Framework was designed
based on several years of extensive theoretical research and practical implementations,
mainly within the Metis knowledge-management project[1].
Definitions of knowledge management abound. In the authors’ view the objective of
knowledge management is to transform organizations with just smart people to smart,
knowledge-productive organizations. The ability to gather information, generate new

DOI 10.1108/13673270710738960 VOL. 11 NO. 2 2007, pp. 109-117, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1367-3270 j JOURNAL OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT j PAGE 109
 knowledge, disseminate and apply this knowledge to improve and innovate is an
organization’s knowledge productivity (Kessels, 2001). Of these abilities, particularly
information gathering benefits from knowledge mapping. Knowledge mapping is about
making the knowledge that is available within an organization transparent and is about
providing insights into its qualities (Huijsen et al., 2003, 2004b). Generally, when employees
look for knowledge, they draw from three sources: other employees, documents of various
types, and information systems (including the internet). First, other employees typically
include close colleagues and other colleagues one knows to have relevant expertise. Unless
it is very important, the search is typically limited to only a few people, which are in direct
proximity (Kraut et al., 1988). Still, there may be others with high-quality knowledge one
misses because one does not know them or is unaware of the expertise one’s colleagues
have. Second, documents often come in large numbers, and with a poor structure to them,
making a quick and effective search very difficult. Third, information systems tend to be
numerous too, and each system has a different interface and internal structure, so that
finding knowledge and piecing together information from across a number of systems is a lot
to ask. The distributed nature of organizational knowledge makes it very hard to get a clear,
complete overview, and to draw conclusions.
Knowledge mapping aims to optimize the effective and efficient use of the corporate
knowledge base by addressing the question how to best support finding the knowledge and
building insights into the qualities of this knowledge (Cross et al., 2001; Huijsen et al., 2004a;
Vail, 1999; Wexler, 2001). Knowledge-mapping systems provide support for addressing
these issues, collecting data on the corporate knowledge from various information systems.
Therefore a knowledge map does not contain knowledge but points to it, as Cross et al.
(2001) states. Collecting data can be done manually, as Wexler (2001) states, but also
(semi-)automatically. The focus in the current article is on (semi-)automatic
knowledge-mapping systems. The knowledge-mapping process is described in detail in
Huijsen et al. (2004b). Put differently, the focus is on information technology, which is one of
the three categories of knowledge management that Schütt (2003) distinguishes. The other
categories – i.e. processes and organization and culture – are outside the scope of this
paper. The next step now after defining knowledge mapping is to illustrate the use of
knowledge-mapping tools. This step is necessary to make the relevance of the
knowledge-mapping framework clear.

2. Introduction to knowledge-mapping framework

Many application areas for knowledge mapping can be identified, cf. van den Berg and
Popescu (2005). The authors found that aggregation of digital sources is very important. For
example, the computer science subjects of a Dutch college were spread out over several
faculties. A knowledge map helped them to stimulate collaboration between teachers and
gave a coherent overview to students of the subjects that were taught. However, this does
not mean every user gets the same view on the knowledge map. Instead the authors plead
for diversity following roles, because students, teachers, and the accounting department
have different needs and views on knowledge maps. Communities constitute another
application area for knowledge mapping. One of the authors’ customers, an international
manufacturer of plastics, supports several virtual communities in which employees share
knowledge (more about this in section 3). For this customer knowledge mapping has been
integrated with the virtual communities to help them the community members find out in a
quick way if relevant information is already available in the community. In this case,
knowledge maps improve the efficiency when answering questions and solving problems. A
third case in point are the knowledge-intensive organizations that employ the authors (Océ
Technologies and the Telematica Instituut). Here, knowledge maps help to find experts on a
certain subject, for instance when new project teams are being formed (refer to Swaak et al.
(2004)). In the actual applications expertise information is derived automatically, since
research and the authors’ experience show that most companies have a hard time keeping
their Yellow Pages up-to-date. Positive exceptions to this rule are consultants, lawyers and
software house employees.

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Besides stimulating collaboration, improving efficiency in problem solving and finding
experts, knowledge maps can also support introducing new employees to the company and
keeping an overview over the expertise in the organization. New (and young) employees
learn from colleagues, about the level of expertise and/or working methods and
organizational culture. However, for an employee of a software house this is more difficult
for he/she may practically never be at the office but working at the customer’s. These
employees therefore lack the overview over the expertise in the company they are working
for (employer and customer). A knowledge map, which gives an overview over the expertise
in the company, in which knowledge domains, documents, and people are related, solves
their (part of their) problem. This knowledge map also benefits older employees sent on
secondment, who cannot get acquainted with the new colleagues and get an idea of their
expertise. At the other end of the spectrum are employees exiting the company. As
knowledge is in people’s head, these employees can take knowledge essential to the
company with them when they leave (refer to DeLong (2004)). A company must know what
knowledge it needs in time to realize its organizational goals. A knowledge map can help you
gain insight in what knowledge is ‘‘available’’ in the organization and what is not. Based on
this insight decisions can be made to hire people with a certain expertise. Furthermore a
company can decide to try and make sure certain knowledge will not be lost, when
employees exit the company. Knowledge maps can show the dynamics in the level of
knowledge on a certain topic in a company. Keeping a pointer to an ex-colleague in the
system can also be useful. In this way a company can hire this ex-colleague to come back for
a certain time to share knowledge with current employees.
All these different applications of knowledge mapping can make it difficult for companies to
decide what knowledge they want to have mapped and what knowledge is already being
mapped. The authors found that all the above-mentioned and other types of knowledge
maps can be ‘summarized’ in one knowledge-mapping framework. Knowledge mapping
basically consists of relations between knowledge items, (groups of) people, activities,
concepts and terms. These elements will be explained below. But first a case study should
help the reader get a good idea of the use of the framework.

3. Case study: knowledge mapping for an online community

In this section the authors sketch the knowledge-mapping system being developed for
Basell. Basell is the world’s largest producer of polypropylene and Europe’s largest producer
of polyethylene, the key ingredients that go into plastics of all kinds. The company maintains
a number of so-called communities of practice (Wenger and Snyder, 2000): discussion
forums in which employees exchange information on-line about professional topics. One
Basell community deals with the complicated process of extrusion, which is a method of
shaping molten plastic resins. The reliability of an extruder machine affects its availability,
whereas small increases in availability have huge financial benefits. This explains the initial
formation of the extrusion reliability community (ERC) at Basell. The ERC counts about 330
members from 45 locations in 20 countries (August 2005). Currently it carries out a
knowledge-mapping pilot study to be described hereafter. Basell’s main goal with respect to
its communities concerns enhancing the knowledge and information flow. A relevant factor is
of course the limited time available to members. This triggered the question whether and
how knowledge maps could improve knowledge exchange within a community.
Requirements for a knowledge-mapping tool have been identified in a preliminary study.
This phase included analyzing documents related to Basell communities, a brainstorming
session with the community moderator and interviews with community members to elicit
feedback on a walk-through of a demonstrator. For the pilot various knowledge-mapping
functionalities have been added to SiteScape Forum, Basell’s community application. These
functionalities include keyword linking in forum messages (leading to knowledge maps on
the subject indicated by the term, which include a.o. other messages on the same subject),
personal profiles of community members (in addition to a who-is-who page), and information
on the individual Basell sites and the extruders being used there. These aspects are related
in the following way (see Figure 1).

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 Figure 1 Model of the knowledge-mapping system for Basell’s ERC

In advance of a detailed description of the framework in section 4 here it suffices to

recognize in Figure 1 the major aspects that relate to the ERC: Persons located at Basell
sites have created community messages. Messages as well as persons can be retrieved by
means of concepts. Figure 1 also illustrates how terms in a forum message are mapped onto
a concept. A concept can be defined as any unit of thought, any idea that forms in a person’s
mind (Gertner, 1978; Kraaij, 2004). Typically, concepts are abstract in that they subsume
various terms: spelling variants, abbreviations, and synonyms. They may contain other, more
specific concepts as well, such that a hierarchy of domain concepts comes about. Together,
the concepts, the terms and the relations between them constitute an ontology (Huijsen et al.,
2003). Basell’s knowledge-mapping system deploys such an ontology, both ‘‘behind the
scenes’’ to map terms to concepts and in the user interface as a means to navigate to
relevant concepts directly. ‘‘Person’’ in Figure 1 stands for ERC members, who can occur in
knowledge maps because they have posted community messages that refer to a certain
topic. Although all aspects and the relations between them are presented here in a single
picture, in the actual pilot application they correspond to a number of knowledge maps (i.e.
pages in the forum tool) joined by hyperlinks. Currently this pilot implementation is being
validated by the community members.
The authors have applied their ideas about knowledge mapping to a number of companies
as presented in section 2. It is clear that other organizational characteristics may lead to
(slightly) different models than the one in Figure 1. Project-based organizations, for instance,
will typically store information about project teams and best practices. When looking for
employees to fulfill a role in a new project team, they may want to turn to this information. In
this situation another picture than the one before would emerge. However, in what follows the
Basell case functions as a concrete implementation of the Framework to be described now.

4. The knowledge mapping framework

Also a wide variety of software exists that can be said to do some type of knowledge
mapping. These tools differ greatly in functionality but also in the types of knowledge that
they chart. Also, in setting up a new knowledge-mapping system, organizations typically
require very different knowledge maps. The wide range of possibilities and the lack of a
structured overview of this make it difficult to set up requirements and to compare the
available tools. The authors now present a framework that makes it possible to classify

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knowledge maps and thereby deal with these issues. First, the following definition of
knowledge maps is used in this article:
A knowledge map is a presentation of one or more aspects of the knowledge available within an
organization that aims to fulfill a specific information need for one or more employee roles within
the organization.

Thus, as discussed in section 3, knowledge maps may differ with respect to the aspects of
organizational knowledge they deal with. The current Framework enumerates the possible
aspects of organizational knowledge. The next section presents a general, high-level
entity-relationship model that describes the entities and their relationships that are central in
understanding the organizational knowledge.

4.1 The knowledge-mapping framework

The following framework (Figure 2) presents a complete inventory of the entities and
relationships that are relevant to understanding and using organizational knowledge. In
concrete cases, the real-world entities and relationships are specific instances of entities
and relationships in this Framework. Figure 1 is an example of such instances.
4.1.1 Entities. The entities are the general entity types that play a role in knowledge within the
organization:
B Activities. Any activities of interest. For example, business processes, projects, work
packages, etc.
B Concepts. The concepts in the knowledge area of interest, used for the classification of
knowledge.
B Terms. Any keywords that may be used to describe a given concept.
B Groups. Any groupings of individuals that are of interest. For example, formal
organizational units, but also more informal ones such as communities of practice.
Groups may recursively contain other groups.
B Knowledge items. Objects that contain information that describes knowledge or refers to
knowledge. For example, documents (electronic or paper), e-mail messages, messages
in communities of practice, databases, etc.
B Persons. Persons relevant to the organization. For example, typically employees (of all
hierarchy levels), but also external parties.
Note that these are general entity types. To apply the framework to a given organization, one
may derive, for each entity type, a number of more specific entity types. For example, it may
be relevant to split ‘‘person’’ up into ‘‘employee’’, ‘‘client’’, and ‘‘supplier’’.
4.1.2 Relationships. The listed entities have a number of relationships between them that
pertain to the knowledge situation. For example, a person ‘‘has expertise on’’ a given
subject. Note that, as with entities, these are general relationship types. To apply the
framework to a given organization, one may derive, for each relationship type, a number of
more specific relationship types.
1. Activities:
B ‘‘is subactivity of’’ – activities may be hierarchically structured. For example, a project
may consist of a number of work packages;
B ‘‘produced’’ – an activity produces knowledge items; and
B ‘‘requires expertise on’’ – activities require expertise on concepts, at a certain level.
2. Concepts: depending on the chosen knowledge-classification system, there may be a
number of relationships between concepts and the associated terms. For the sake of
simplicity of the framework, terms and the synonymy relationship are not made explicit:
B ‘‘is associated with’’ – the association relationship for concepts; and
B ‘‘is subconcept of’’ – the subsumption relationship for concepts.

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 3. Groups:
B ‘‘created’’ – see under ‘‘persons’’;
B ‘‘executes’’ – a group may execute a given activity;
B ‘‘has expertise on’’ – a group may have expertise on a given concept;
B ‘‘has expertise required by’’ – a group may have expertise required by a given activity;
B ‘‘is subgroup of’’ – groups may be hierarchically structured; and
B ‘‘is interested in’’ – see under ‘‘persons’’.
4. Knowledge items:
B ‘‘contains knowledge required by’’ – knowledge items may contain knowledge
required by certain activities;
B ‘‘describes’’ – knowledge items describe or specify activities; and
B ‘‘is about’’ – knowledge items are about concepts.
5. Persons:
B ‘‘accessed’’ – people access knowledge items;
B ‘‘created’’ – people and groups create knowledge items;
B ‘‘exchanged information with’’ – people exchange information with each other on
concepts;
B ‘‘executes’’ – a person may execute a given activity;
B ‘‘has expertise on’’ – people and groups have expertise on concepts;
B ‘‘has expertise required by’’ – a person may have expertise required by a given
activity;
B ‘‘is interested in’’ – people and groups are interested in concepts; and
B ‘‘is part of’’ – people are part of groups.
6. Terms:
B ‘‘is term for’’ – is a term used for describing a given concept; and
B ‘‘is preferred term for’’ – is the preferred term used for describing a given concept.

4.2 Applying the knowledge-mapping framework

The detailed description of the knowledge-mapping framework in the previous section is
followed by issues that may arise in applying the framework to practical situations. First,
the issue of building connectors. In order to be able to extract the relevant information
from various information systems, connectors have to be put in place. This requires the
information systems to allow for this. In the ERC case, earlier versions of SiteScape
Forum used an internal database that did not allow for easy access to the community
messages, thus posing an obstacle to the development of the knowledge-mapping
extensions. Upgrading to a newer version that uses an external database solved this
issue. Second, there is the need to align internal representations. This is due to the fact
that knowledge mapping brings together pointers to knowledge from various sources.
These sources typically have their own internal representations that are in no way
aligned to each other because there never was the need to. For example, in the ERC
case, the entity ‘‘person’’ is modeled in two of Basell’s information systems: as user in
SiteScape forum and as employee in Basell’s employee database. Of course, in order to
tie together the information associated with persons from these sources, one has to
define an identity mapping. This issue may arise for multiple entities and multiple
information systems.

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4.3 Benefits from the knowledge-mapping framework
The authors’ proposed conceptual framework for knowledge mapping enables new ways of
working with knowledge mapping by articulating and visualizing relevant aspects of
requirements and existing tools. This is of use in the following activities: first, in assessing the
available knowledge. The information on relevant entities as it is available in existing
information systems is the basis for any knowledge-mapping system one may want to
implement. Therefore, it is important, at the outset, to first make an inventory of the potential
sources and the entities, relations, and attributes they may yield. The framework may readily
be used to collect the results of such an inventory, and to understand their potential for the
knowledge-mapping system. Second, in defining system requirements. The framework
enables organizations that are in the process of defining their knowledge-mapping
requirements to comprehensively assess all relevant aspects. Third, in assessing tools. A
plethora of tools is available that address one or more aspects of knowledge mapping; few
tools fully implement the knowledge-mapping concept (section 5 describes the results of the
tool study). This may or may not be a problem in implementing knowledge mapping,
depending on the scope of the desired functionality. Also, the documentation on the tools
offered by vendors typically and understandably stresses the functionality the tool does
offer, and does so in a verbose, non-technical way that makes it difficult to assess the
technical characteristics and inner workings that are relevant to a good assessment. The
framework enables assessment of tools in all relevant aspects by providing an exhaustive list
of types of entities and relations, so that vendor documentation can be read more effectively,
and relevant additional questions to vendors can be phrased in a more targeted way. Fourth,
in comparing tools against each other, and matching them against requirements. The
combination of the previous two uses of the Framework also enables matching tools with
established requirements.

5. Vendors of knowledge-mapping tools

The authors’ knowledge-mapping framework was developed iteratively in conjunction with
knowledge-management research for customers from sectors as varied as process industry,
R&D, and academia. This way they could gradually improve and refine it, based on new
experiences. Moreover, they validated the framework against a number of commercially
available tools with knowledge-mapping functionality. The outcome of this validation is the
topic of the current section. The authors have selected a sample from the plethora of tools
with knowledge-mapping functionality[2]. This selection contains the following tools:
Autonomy, TheBrain, Collexis, Convera, Inxight, Knowledge Reef, MetaSight en Verity
K2E[3]. Among them are both well-known and less well-known vendors. Tools in the
selection also differ in the degree to which they offer advanced visualization techniques.
Furthermore, since the authors often deal with companies with a seat in The Netherlands
they included Dutch tools in the selection. The initial observation is that currently none of the
inspected tools explicitly presents the core aspects of the framework as discussed in section
4 (because product functionality changes all the time this article refrains from detailing which
particular tool offers what functionality). This observation, however, does not warrant the
claim that they are no knowledge-mapping tools, nor that the Framework would be
unrealistic. On the contrary, many tools in the selection reported on here do offer
knowledge-mapping functionality: firstly, they disclose multiple information sources and
secondly, they are able to bring together the information residing there.
It is the latter functionality that distinguishes knowledge-mapping tools from search tools.
The former functionality is commonly called federated search, but is also known as parallel
search, meta search, broadcast search, one-search, cross searching, cross-database
searching, distributed searching, and single search (Krajewsky, 2004). It means searching
different sources at the same time such as databases, file systems, CRM applications, and
document management systems. A federated search tool will present just the one search
interface to the user and act as an intermediary to all the other information sources,
deploying searches, collating responses, and presenting a single result list to the user. This
functionality is crucial for sharing information among the branches of an enterprise and
across the partners in a supply chain. Six of the tools in the sample have connectors

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 interfacing with a substantial number of information sources. Apart from connector
technology it is also necessary to solve the subscription and authentication issues; here the
authors assume that the searcher is allowed to access all underlying information sources.
Now if some sources refer to employees, others to projects (the activity entity in the
framework) and a third group to documents, retrieving and presenting who authored what
document in the course of which project is certainly feasible. This extends the search
functionality with knowledge-mapping functionality.
A number of inspected tools register what users search for and/or what knowledge items
(content) they contribute, which instantiates the Framework relations ‘‘is interested in’’ and
‘‘created’’, respectively. From this the tools conclude to a person’s interest and expertise,
respectively. This supports the process of expertise location (Lamont, 2003; Leavitt, 2003) in
an organization and can stimulate people to maintain their expertise and interests in a
personal profile that colleagues can access. Along with locating expertise three tools in the
selection claim to automatically derive communities. People who have produced knowledge
items in a certain knowledge domain and/or search for it are considered members of the
same virtual community by one of the tools. For another tool people retrieving related content
constitute such a community (cf. the relation ‘‘accessed’’). Based on common topics in email
communication (cf. the relation ‘‘is about’’) a third tool derives what it calls communities of
interest. This matches the group aspect of the framework. All tools present this information in
relation to the content domain and enable the user to contact community members on the
spot, deploying the ‘‘contact information’’ that may be associated with the entity ‘‘person’’.
However, since neither tool actively notifies community members of this arrangement, it is
doubtful whether any community feeling arises (Wenger and Snyder, 2000).

6. Conclusions
The authors described the knowledge-mapping framework they developed based on
theoretical and practical research they conducted on knowledge mapping. At a theoretical
level this framework contributes to the research on knowledge mapping. Practically, the
authors’ framework helps companies gain insight in the elements of knowledge-mapping
tools they already have, define requirements of the knowledge mapping tool they would like,
assess existing tools and compare them to each other. The authors validated their
framework against a number of commercially available tools with knowledge-mapping
functionality. An important asset of this type of tools is the federated search functionality. With
respect to the sample of tools the main conclusion is that they do not make the framework’s
entities and relationships as explicit as desirable in a proper knowledge map. However, they
implement many of the framework’s entities and relations. The authors conclude that the
framework describes these tools well. Therefore, it does not only model the situations that
gave rise to it but also proved to be robust to new (types of) knowledge-mapping tools.
Finally, future research is planned in the following directions: firstly, the authors will
investigate whether the framework can be developed into a separate tool. Secondly, the
knowledge-mapping research reported on here so far has focused on semi-automatically
collecting data for the knowledge map. The authors now intend to focus on fully-automatic
data collection in the near future.

Notes
1. Refer to http://metis.telin.nl/

2. See the list provided by Denham Grey on www.voght.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?KmMapTools

3. Refer to Autonomy: www.autonomy.com, Collexis: www.collexis.com, Convera: www.convera.com,
Inxight: www.inxight.com, Knowledge Reef: www.knowledgereef.nl, MetaSight:www.metasight.co.
uk, TheBrain: www.thebrain.com and Verity: www.verity.com

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Corresponding author
Samuel Driessen can be contacted at: samuel.driessen@oce.com

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