Knowledge has been lately recognized as one of the most important assets of organizations. Can information technology help the growth and the sustainment of organizational knowledge? The answer is yes, if care is taken to remember that IT here is just a part of the story (corporate culture and work practices being equally relevant) and that the information technologies best suited for this purpose should be expressly designed with knowledge management in view. This special issue of the Journal of Universal Computer Science contains a selection of papers from the First Conference on Practical Applications of Knowledge Management. Each paper describes a specific type of information technology suitable for the support of different aspects of knowledge management.

knowledge management, information technology, knowledge life-cycle, knowledge work processes, corporate memories, information filtering