The core activities of knowledge management are a knowledge creation, sharing and reuse. Through these activities, internal and external knowledge would become a corporate memory. For this, it is required an expert to create the tacit knowledge. However it is difficult for an organization to have an expert in all various areas to manage a deluge of knowledge in an Internet era. Especially for external knowledge, it is hard to find an expert inside of the organization. Even though the organization has an expert for the knowledge, it causes duplicated costs at the industry level to create the knowledge because all organization which need the knowledge create the same knowledge based on the same external information from the scratch. Therefore it is more efficient to create the knowledge by the information provider or outside of the organization and then the knowledge should be shared with other organizations.
For inter-organizational knowledge sharing, it is important how to represent the knowledge independent of various knowledge representation languages and how to maintain the knowledge. This study focused on these two factors and then suggested inter-organizational knowledge sharing structure with eXtensible Rule Markup Language (XRML). XRML is a rule-based approach to represent the knowledge on Web environment and makes the transformation easy between heterogeneous knowledge representations. Furthermore XRML is able to maintain the consistency between HTML for human and rules for agent. Finally, to apply the structure, this study developed the application of XRML based inter-organizational knowledge sharing for a legal application named "Approval advice system on a construction plan" according to City Gas Business Legislation and proposed new version 0.6 of XRML DTD via this application.
