A review of data mining in knowledge management: applications/findings for transportation of small and medium enterprises

A core subfield of knowledge management (KM) and data mining (DM) constitutes an integral part of the knowledge discovery in database process. With the explosion of information in the new digital age, research studies in the DM and KM continue to heighten up in the business organisations, especially so, for the small and medium enterprises (SMEs). DM is crucial in supporting the KM application as it processes the data to useful knowledge and KM role next, is to manage these knowledge assets within the organisation systematically. At the comprehensive appraisal of the large enterprise in the transportation sector and the SMEs across various industries—it was gathered that there is limited research case study conducted on the application of DM–KM on the transportation SMEs in specific. From the extensive review of the case studies, it was uncovered that majority of the organisations are not leveraging on the use of tacit knowledge and that the SMEs are adopting a more traditional use of ICTs to its KM approach. In addition, despite DM–KM is being widely implemented—the case studies analysis reveals that there is a limitation in the presence of an integrated DM–KM assessment to evaluate the outcome of the DM–KM application. This paper concludes that there is a critical need for a novel DM–KM assessment plan template to evaluate and ensure that the knowledge created and implemented are usable and relevant, specifically for the SMEs in the transportation sector. Therefore, this research paper aims to carry out an in-depth review of data mining in knowledge management for SMEs in the transportation industry.