Integrating spatial, semantic, and social structures for knowledge management

In this paper we describe a unique type of knowledge management systems - virtual reality-enabled multi-user virtual environments with spatialized semantic structures. They are designed to enable users to exploit emerging knowledge structures shared among a group of people and engage in social interaction with concurrent users in the virtual world. The design principle is illustrated by an example of how a heterogeneous collection of accumulated documents and user profiles is visualized. Resultant spatial structures reveal not only inter-document relationships, but also the interconnectivity between user profiles and documents.