The Visual Wiki: A New Metaphor for Knowledge Access and Management

Successful knowledge management results in a competitive advantage in today\´s information- and knowledge-rich industries. The elaboration and integration of emerging Web-based tools and services has proven suitable for collecting and organizing intellectual property. Due to an increasing information overload, information and knowledge visualizations have become effective methods for representing complex bodies of knowledge in an alternative fashion by using visual languages. The focus of this research is the development of a "Visual Wiki", which combines the notion of a textual and a visual representation of knowledge. A Visual Wiki model has been proposed which provides a unified framework to design and discuss different approaches. Three prototypes of Visual Wikis have been implemented and evaluated according to the improvements to certain knowledge management applications that they facilitate.