This book contains the papers presented at the 4th International Conference on Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management organized by the Department of Knowledge Management, Institute of Informatics and Business Informatics, University of Vienna. The event took place on 2002, December 2–3 in Vienna, Austria. The PAKM conference series is a forum for people to share their views, to exchange ideas, to develop new insights, and to envision completely new kinds of solutions to knowledge management problems, because to succeed in the accelerating pace of the “Internet age,” organizations will be obliged to efficiently leverage their most valuable and underleveraged resource: the intellectual capital of their highly educated, skilled, and experienced employees. Thus next-generation business solutions must be focussed on supporting the creation of value by adding knowledge-rich components as integral parts in the work process. The authors, who work at the leading edge of knowledge management, have pursued integrated approaches which consider both the technological side, and the business side, and the organizational and cultural issues. We hope the papers, covering a broad range of knowledge management topics, will be valuable, at the same extent, for researchers and practitioners developing knowledge management approaches and applications. It was a real joy seeing the visibility of the conference increase and noting that knowledge management researchers and practitioners from all over the world submitted papers. This year, 90 papers and case studies were submitted, from which 55 were accepted.
