Distributed Knowledge Management is an approach to Knowledge Management based on the principle that the multiplicity (and
heterogeneity) of perspectives within complex organizations should not be viewed as an obstacle to knowledge exploitation,
but rather as an opportunity that can foster innovation and creativity. Despite a wide agreement on this principle, most current
KM systems are based on the idea that all perspectival aspects of knowledge should be eliminated in favor of an objective
and general representation of knowledge. In this paper we propose a peer-to-peer architecture (called KEx), which embodies
the principle above in a quite straightforward way: (i) each peer (called a K-peer) provides all the services needed to create
and organize “local” knowledge from an individual’s or a group’s perspective, and (ii) social structures and protocols of
meaning negotiation are defined to achieve semantic coordination among autonomous peers (e.g., when searching documents from
other K-peers).