1st International Workshop on the design, development and use of Knowledge IT Artifacts in professional communities and aggregations

Broadly meant, a Knowledge Artifact (KA) is any artifact purposely built to support knowledge-related processes; these latter include archival of and access to knowledge sources, knowledge sharing & exchange, its retrieval and exploitation, its production & learning (internalization). For this reason, KAs come in very different formats and types: just to limit ourselves to the electronic KAs, what we can denote as Knowledge IT artifacts (to hint at those specific IT artifacts, i.e., applications and software platforms, that specifically support knowledge creation and sharing), examples include: · decision support systems that convey the most pertinent items from the knowledge bodies mentioned above according to the situation or the user requests, profiles and needs; · online digital platforms enabling an aggregation of firms (a cluster, a supply chain) to share valuable knowledge in order to achieve specific strategic aims (such as internationalization, new product development, lean production); · online wiki encyclopedias and manuals that represent objectively, if not structuredly (e.g., ontologically) a body of specialist knowledge; · multimedia learning software that integrate different content sources and interactive techniques to have users develop both intellectual and practical competencies on the basis of the knowledge embedded in the artifacts.