Towards knowledge discovery through context explication

More and more knowledge does play a decisive role as a factor of production besides the classic factors work, raw materials, and capital. Companies get a competitive advantage from a lead of knowledge and the capability to transform superior knowledge into market driven business processes. The consistent orientation towards customers and their processes requires the customization of intracorporate processes and systems. Customer process oriented portals support the collaboration of customers, employees, and suppliers. They integrate companies´ systems and provide transparent access to information objects stored in these systems. One key problem is to find relevant information objects in continuously growing and distributed systems. Necessary conditions for the core processes of knowledge identification and knowledge use are mechanisms of navigation and linking as well as functionalities for extensive searches and investigations. A decisive challenge is to make knowledge available at the right time and the right place. Therefore, the implicit context of information has to be explicated to fill ´knowledge gaps´. In this paper, we introduce a continuum of context explication, which comprises different relations between information objects and its contexts by means of their degree and ease of context explication. Furthermore, we evaluate different approaches for knowledge discovery in customer process oriented portals, provide patterns when to apply which approach, and present two small cases for knowledge discovery in such portals.