Ontologies application in organizational learning: A literature review

Although ontologies and organizational learning are issues that have been discussed for many years, there is not an approach on literature that gives an overview about how both issues have been applied together. This literature review has the objective of exploring how ontologies are being applied in the organizational learning process recently: as a consequence, only studies from the year of 2005 onwards have been searched. The identification process produced 353 papers from 11 different databases. After applying the exclusion criteria, the set was reduced to 11 papers, which clearly fitted to the criteria defined for accomplishment of the systematic review, which were then analyzed and classified. The papers have been classified according to the structure and level of the ontologies. Furthermore, the Information Technology (IT) used in conjunction with ontology was identified, as well as the way ontologies and IT can act as a means of facilitating the organizational learning process. It was observed that although ontologies are rather important, a very few number of researches have applied ontologies in the organizational learning processes. In a general way, ontologies and IT encourage the sharing of knowledge and formalization. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.