What is Contextual Knowledge

This chapter introduces and reviews the concept of distributed knowledge management within the Healthcare environment and between Healthcare and other partner organisations. As management should not be mistaken for control, distributed should not be identified with multicentered. Trade-offs between managerial centralism and social contextuality should be allowed. Although the core issues in knowledge management are not technological, tools that can support the central versus social dualism of knowledge management are critical to the effective and appropriate use of generated knowledge. Information tools can significantly affect the user experience and local social wiliness to participation and enhance the managerial trends that make use of knowledge networks and shared logistics. They include service-oriented architectures (SOA), artificial intelligence networks (AIN), multiple agent systems (MAS) and the contextual tools of Web 2.0. All of those tools feed their functionality on the semantic detail, the granularity and the trust levels enjoyed by their information sources.