Applying ontologies in knowledge management: a systematic review

IntroductionOntologies as tools for visualizing domain knowledge and improving information search and retrieval have attracted the attention of many researchers in different subject areas. One of the domains where the application of ontologies can be the subject of many researches is knowledge management, while it has been less discussed so far. The aim of this research is the qualitative and quantitative analysis of studies related to the application of ontologies in the knowledge management domain in order to identify these applications the main subject areas and their aspects.Literature ReviewReasons for creating ontologies include the ability to reuse knowledge, sharing a common understanding of the structure of information between human and software (machines), analyzing domain knowledge, describing basic concepts in a subject domain, and the relationship between them (Montenegro et al. 2012). Therefore, considering the application of ontology in knowledge engineering and since access to knowledge has a major contribution to the progress of societies in today's world, the way of accessing and managing this knowledge among the large amount of information is very important and challenging. Knowledge management is also one of the topics that is of interest to researchers in various fields. Ontologies are one of the tools for organizing and managing knowledge. Despite the significant number context-based research on the use of these tools and the use of ontologies in knowledge management, lack of connection and understanding between researches in the field of ontology and applied knowledge management will cause knowledge management to be deprived of these tools. Therefore, the following research aims to analyze the studies in the field of ontology application in knowledge management. As it mentioned, most of the research in this field is context-based. The fields of education (Yang, Chen, & Shao, 2004), architecture (Anumba et al, 2008), agriculture (Zheng et al., 2012) and medicine (Zhou et al., 2020) are among the context-based researches in the field of application of ontology in knowledge management. Moreover, identifying the obstacles and challenges of using these tools in the context of knowledge management is another aspect that has not been addressed in the researches. Therefore, this study focuses on researches that are generally discussed applications and methods the use of ontology in knowledge management and research about the application of o