Enhancing knowledge management through the use of GIS and multimedia

Knowledge is probably the most important capital for an organization, constituting thus its management an issue of high significance. The majority of existing solutions utilize static sources for knowledge (document repositories), allowing for minimum support for tacit knowledge that is an outcome of an on demand cooperation with an appropriate expert. In this paper we describe a system that introduces the concurrent integration of Multimedia and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) functions in Knowledge Management (KM) applications. In most Knowledge Management systems one of the real challenges is expert's knowledge utilization. Towards this direction, we exploit possible technological prospects and we present the architecture of a prototype developed to implement selected innovative KM components by embedding state-of-the-art multimedia Java-based applications integrated in parallel with GIS functionality.