Abstract
Knowledge Map has been widely used in the knowledge management area. Because of the independent and self-organization, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architecture gets more attention from researchers of this area. However, traditional client-server based knowledge map technology may not suitable for applying to the P2P environment directly. For assisting individual peer to explore the external knowledge in a P2P environment, this study proposes a visualized cognitive knowledge map integration system. By using the SOM-like model, this system can provide a visualized knowledge map; moreover, by using the Egocentric SOM proposed in this study, this system will merge the external knowledge under the a focal peer’s knowledge structure. In order to understand the proposed integration method, we collected abstracts of research reports from the Industrial Economics and Knowledge (IEK) Center at the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Taiwan, and assigned these abstracts to different peers according to their authors of abstracts. The results from the evaluation experiments reveal that ESOM is capable to keep the knowledge structure from the original knowledge map.