Knowledge retrieval and personalization in virtual enterprises

Each business company collects, produces and exploits for its activities and goals large amounts of information. Most of the times this knowledge makes the intellectual capital for creating value and innovation. Knowledge management (KM) systems aim at manipulating knowledge by storing and redistributing corporate information that are acquired from the organization's members. In this context, Virtual Enterprises (VE) plays a crucial role as not permanent alliances of enterprises joined together to share resources and skills in order to better respond to business opportunities. The representation and retrieval of distributed knowledge is an important feature that information systems must provide in order to obtain advantages from this kind of enterprises. KEEN 1 (Knowledge-based Extended Enterprise) is a research project for developing a system able to extract and let different business companies access to collective knowledge required to achieve particular shared goals. In this paper, we report the most important features of this system, especially in the context of distributed knowledge representation and retrieval.