A spatial hypertext wiki for knowledge management

Collaboration is a key factor in successful knowledge management. Recently, wikis have become a popular solution for distributed and collaborative knowledge management. However, most wikis do not appropriately support the facilities needed for group idea creation and can only represent unstructured knowledge (text, images, and hyperlinks) which cannot be reused or systematized. This paper proposes the use of a Spatial Hypertext Wiki (ShyWiki) as a knowledge management wiki which allows users to interact in a distributed and collaborative way in order to generate ideas, and organize and structure knowledge. This type of wiki can help in the externalization of tacit knowledge, and is able to represent explicit knowledge at different levels of formality. Furthermore, the visual and spatial characteristics of this wiki can be used for representing implicit relations among concepts as well as for organizing and visualizing knowledge.