Hong Kong, like the rest of the world, is continuing its transformation from an information and production-based society to a knowledge-based (KB) society. In a KB society, increasingly, organizations compete based on the individual competence of its employees, collective knowledge of the firm, its trading partners and suppliers.  Under such a trading environment, very often the value-add provided by an organization is measured by added knowledge that it can provide, the time needed to generate/locate the needed knowledge, and the quality of decision made.

Knowledge Management, in its wider interpretation, encompasses key theories and techniques from many diversified areas such as Information and Communications Technology, Information Retrieval, Organizational Learning, Organizational Change Management, People Management. New areas are also involved. For example, fostering and sustaining online communities, organizational memory information systems, and the management and measurement of intangible assets in organizations.

The Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has played an active role in teaching, researching and promoting the applications of Knowledge Engineering and Management (KEM). The Knowledge Solutions Laboratory (KSL) has been established with the aim to provide an open and integrated environment to support teaching, research, industrial collaboration and technology transfer in relation to the KEM activities in various areas such as knowledge management program, knowledge audit, organizational learning, participated collaborative learning, knowledge portal engineering, enterprise collaborative technologies, managing and measuring intellectual capital, artificial intelligence in knowledge management, data and text mining for knowledge discovery, peer-to-peer knowledge resource planning, etc.

Basically, KSL is composed of two parts which include a Demonstration Room and a Knowledge Resources Unit, respectively. The demonstration room provides an excellence environment for conducting seminar, small group teaching and demonstration. The Knowledge Resources Unit is provided with a comprehensive collection of up-to-date software, multi-media package and reference materials that will expose students and researchers to various aspects on KEM.  

KSL is equipped with the state-of-art software solutions such as the Microsoft .NET solution suite for Knowledge Portal Engineering, KM builder, Matlab for Knowledge-Based System Design and Simulation, etc. The Microsoft .Net solution suite provides with a series of software packages which include SharePoint Server, Content Management Server, Small Business Server, Visual Studio .NET, SQL Server 2000, Exchange Server, etc.  All of which are meant to support the relevant activities of the laboratory.