1 The Quality of Knowledge: Knowledge Patterns and Knowledge Refactorings Jörg Rech*, Björn Decker, Eric Ras, Andreas Jedlitschka Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Kaiserslautern, Rhineland-Palatine, Germany E-mail: (joerg.rech, bjoern.decker, eric.ras, jedl)@iese.fraunhofer.de *Corresponding author Raimund L. Feldmann Fraunhofer USA, Center for Experimental Software Engineering, Maryland 4321 Hartwick Road, Suite 500, College Park, MD 20742-3290, USA E-mail: Rfeldmann@fc-md.umd.edu Abstract: Knowledge management is a relatively young discipline. Nevertheless, it has accumulated a valuable body-of-knowledge in the structuring of knowledge and in the design of socio-technical knowledge management systems. However, concepts to describe common, recurring patterns of how to describe, structure, interrelate, group, or manage knowledge elements are still missing. In this paper, we introduce the concepts “knowledge pattern” and “knowledge anti-pattern” to describe best and worst practices in knowledge management, “knowledge refactoring” to improve or change knowledge anti-patterns, and “quality of knowledge” to describe desirable characteristics of knowledge in knowledge management systems. The concepts are transferred from software engineering to the field of knowledge management based on our experience from several knowledge management projects. Keywords: knowledge management best practices, knowledge patterns, knowledge management patterns, knowledge refactoring, knowledge quality, quality of knowledge 1 INTRODUCTION Today, knowledge management (KM) as well as learning management (LM) consist of a multitude of models, theories, and systems comprised of valuable and recurring knowledge that waits to be reused in new KM systems. However, the quality of the knowledge gained, the technical KM system used, or the social KM method applied is neither easy to be evaluated, nor is it easy to be improved. Many best practices in form of success factors (Mathi, 2004) (Thomas, 2006) (Morisio, Ezran, & Tully, 2002), success models (Jennex & Olfman, 2004, , 2006), success measures (Jen & Yu, 2006), reference architectures for KM systems (Davenport & Probst, 2000; Mertins, 2003), or worst practices (Fahey & Prusak, 1998) are known in KM and typically preserve knowledge about the whole KM systems or initiative. But commonly accepted best practices on how to structure knowledge, how to design an interface for a KM system, or how to start a storytelling session can hardly be found and concepts to describe common, recurring patterns of how to describe, structure, interrelate, group, or manage knowledge are still missing. During the mid-1990s the concept “design pattern” was developed in software engineering to describe best practices regarding the design of software systems in a structured way. Design patterns are used to represent knowledge that is based on experiences captured in several real-world projects and which is widely accepted. This semi-formal representation is often used for describing and presenting the gained knowledge. In this paper, we transfer the concepts quality, patterns, and refactoring from software engineering to the field of KM and introduce the concepts of knowledge patterns and knowledge refactorings in the context of knowledge