
 
clear that having more prepared and experienced 
teams will result in higher chances of winning a 
project but the individuals who make up these teams 
often rely on tacit, subjective knowledge gained 
through personal experience. Therefore by capturing 
different steps and results in their work process 
assuring knowledge articulation, collaboration and 
sharing we can help others become more effective.  
4  WORKSPACE DESIGN 
To address the issues in this case study around 
informal processes and to increase productivity of 
knowledge workers two kinds of support tools are 
being developed: 1) helping knowledge workers find 
the right information given their current context and 
task and 2) helping large project teams work 
collaboratively, supporting knowledge articulation 
and sharing. The first class of tools considers usage 
of information technologies mainly relying on 
Information Retrieval and Knowledge Discovery 
techniques for knowledge management. In this paper 
we aim to address the second challenge and help 
large teams work collaboratively while trying to 
capture informal tacit knowledge. The goal is to 
achieve this without introducing considerable 
overhead to the knowledge worker.  
4.1  Semantic Wikis 
In (Schaffert et al., 2006) the authors described 
semantic wikis as solutions merging social software 
assuring choice of processes and supporting 
collaboration with Semantic Technologies enabling 
structuring information for easy retrieval, reuse and 
exchange between different tools. With this in mind 
there have been a number of structured wiki projects 
both as research efforts and in the last years as 
commercial solutions: Semantic Media Wiki (SMW) 
(Krötzsch et al., 2006.), IkeWiki (Schaffert, 2006), 
SemperWiki (Oren, 2005), TikiWiki
1
 with 
Semantics Links extension, Confluence with 
Wikidsmart
2
, 2010), SMW+ Semantic Enterprise 
Wiki
3
. On one side traditional wikis enable features 
as: editing in a browser, use of wiki syntax, rollback 
mechanisms with versioned pages, strong linking 
between wiki pages and collaborative editing. On 
the other side, semantic wikis enable machine 
 
1
 http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Semantic 
2
 http://www.zagile.com/products/wikidsmart.html 
3
 http://wiki.ontoprise.de/smwforum/index.php/Main_Page 
readable representation of underlying wiki 
structures, by allowing annotation of links between 
pages e.g. through giving them certain types 
(Schaffert et al., 2006). Link annotation enables: 
enriched content by displaying context relevant 
information based on the semantic annotation (e.g. 
pages regarding a company can be enriched by a list 
of alliance companies); semantic navigation 
through enabling additional information regarding 
what each link is describing (e.g. Company page can 
have links hasEmpoyees, isLocated and wasFounded 
displayed for navigation etc.). Semantic search 
enables searching for related concept instances using 
the underlying knowledge base (e.g. Company x 
hasClient would list all annotated clients of a certain 
company).  Reasoning  offers inference of implicit 
information by using the wiki knowledge base as 
well as external sources. 
4.2  Informal Processes 
We start from the intuition that tacit informal 
knowledge of an employee is learned through years 
of experience. We consider two main issues: 1) How 
to better capture different steps (or results) of 
different tasks so that employees referring to the 
central repository have more information and 2) 
How to enable the transfer of this knowledge to new 
employees. 
The major differentiator between our setting and 
typical knowledge management setting dealing with 
improved navigation browsing and searching is that 
we focus on the process, in our case the informal 
process of proposal development, and not only on 
the end product –the final document.  
In (Granitzer et al., 2008) the authors considered 
using semantic wikis for organised provision and 
efficient retrieval of information. Through their 
analysis of different studies they claim that 80% of 
knowledge which is required for performing 
knowledge work is a result of informal learning. 
Wikis were chosen as a supporting tool for informal 
learning since they naturally foster participation and 
collaboration. In (Schaffert, 2006) Schaffert 
introduces ideas around merging social software 
(wikis, blogs, social networks etc.) dealing with 
social connections and human readable content 
dealing with Semantic Web with formal content and 
its formal connections. Semantic wikis are therefore 
seen as a solution enabling interrelating of informal 
unstructured collaboration and conversation records 
in wikis. However Granitzer et al. only give an 
example scenario, we take their hypothesis further 
on and develop a prototype build upon extending 
initial ideas.