In our world where Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play a very important strategic role, organisations are challanged to efficiently leverage their most valuable and underleveraged resource: the intellectual capital of their highly educated, skilled, and experienced employees. The success in a world characterised by the accelerating pace of the "internet age" and the compression of communication cycles is conditioned by a faster return on knowledge - knowledge that ages rapidly in a market place brimming with innovation.

The PAKM Conference Series offers a communication forum and meeting ground for practitioners and researchers in developing and deploying advanced business solutions for the management of knowledge and intellectual capital. PAKM is a forum for people to share their views, to exchange ideas, to develop new insights, and to envision completely new kinds of solutions to Knowledge Management problems.

The University of Vienna hosts the PAKM-Conference for the second time.The active participation of researchers and practitioners at the PAKM2002 supports us in the expectation of a successfull PAKM2004. This forum offers for the University of Vienna the possiblity to introduce and positions its research results in the field of Knowledge Management to an international specialist public.

The topics cover the relevant aspects of the application and research areas of Knowledge Management. We invite practitioners and researchers from different countries to submitt papers to this conference and look forward to run a conference dealing with a diversity of current topics and results.

Dimitris Karagiannis, Ulrich Reimer
Conference Chairs