Towards an Anthropological-Based Knowledge Management

"To make the knowledge useful […], the KM manager must create a single shared understanding among people of what the knowledge means to the organization within the context of its business domain and how it is intended to be used."(Malafsky and Newman) However people possess their own knowledge, meaning that useful knowledge from an individual or a collective will be useless for another. We defend the idea that knowledge isn't determined by a context of use but by people who own it. So, to enable knowledge management, we have to first classify knowledge according to people. This paper proposes a way to organize knowledge based on an ontological classification of people. An ontological representation comes from Philippe Descola's book "Beyond nature and culture" (2005), which explains that humans use their experience to organize the world, following a logical process in two parts, namely Identification and Relations leading to the modeling of their Ontology – Ontology with a capital "O" will be used in the context of the specification by an individual of what exist in the world and their relationships. That's the classification of these Ontologies into ontologies – "a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization" (Studer, Benjamins, Fensel, 1998) – which leads us to an ontological classification. By linking an ontology to the knowledge that comes from its people, we will prove that both are related. In fact these ontologies determine knowledge and thus ontologies classification organize knowledge. While investigating the relation between ontologies and knowledge, we observe that using inadequate knowledge in a multi-ontological context can trigger crisis due to the information interpretation, strengthening the need to manage it. In an attempt to expand the scale of knowledge use which is determined by people ontologies – echoing an ontological capital of people –, we shall discuss about merging informations to create an heterotopic phenomenon by using several knowledges resulting of a consultation process based on mutual knowledge. Introduction: It's a known practice in knowledge management to use contexts or domains to organize knowledge but in fact it's not the best practice. The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that a knowledge classification emerging from people Ontologies surpass the traditional organization based on the context in which the knowledge is used. This ontological classification stems from Philippe Descola's two steps process which allow us to model people Ontology through Identification and Relations. On one hand Identification organizes existing being in collectives using intrinsic ontological properties, on the other hand Relations establishes their relationship through extrinsic characteristics. By aggregating similar Ontologies in a shared ontology, we are able to propose a multi-scalar ontological classification. To link these ontologies with knowledge, we use the anthropologist definition of knowledge which suggests that Ontologies are primary knowledge. To validate this proposition, we first demonstrate that the sustainable development ontology is a basis to knowledge creation in call for proposals and projects on the domain of the risks. Then we show that the sustainable development ontology shapes knowledge in any context of use by analyzing the land planning of a territorial project called Taonaba. While investigating this territorial project, it seems that an inadequate use of knowledge was related to the creation of a crisis between two communities. Indeed, the situation of Taonaba reveals a multi-ontological context – the sustainable development group and the Maroons – with a one sided use of knowledge on its land planning. Considering knowledge as information that an ontological framework successfully interprets, as a result it is impossible for the Maroons to understand the sustainable development believers' use of knowledge. A late consultation process which failed to integrate properly the Maroon expresses the need of mutual recognition to enable a real participation of each stakeholder. Eventually, the heterotopic properties of information make possible the co-utilization of knowledge which could solve multi-ontological problematic.