Organization of Lessons Learned Knowledge: A Taxonomy and Implementation

With knowledge management systems (KMS) containing large repositories, a major issue is content organization. The ease of finding relevant information depends on the effectiveness of knowledge organization. Ontology, thesauri, and taxonomy are some of the key words that relate to knowledge organization. In this article we propose a schema for organizing knowledge that represents lessons learned from prior experience. Such knowledge from lessons learned has distinct characteristics so that it can be organized in specific ways for ease of discovery, retrieval, and also possible incorporation in formal learning. The proposed taxonomy includes concepts from domain related hierarchy, sources of lessons learned, formal learning, and collaborative inputs (Web 2.0). We describe the proposed taxonomy for organizing the lessons learned knowledge (also termed as knowledge nuggets) and provide details of a specific implementation of this taxonomy in a military organization. Such approaches to knowledge organization have the potential to be useful in many other knowledge management (KM) projects.