Knowledge environments are social practices, technological and physical arrangements intended to facilitate collaborative knowledge building, decision making, inference or discovery, depending on the epistemological premises and goals.
From this perspective the primary purpose of knowledge environments is to host and support activities of knowledge building, the means including cognitive ergonomics, social software, immediate information access exploiting means of multimedia and hypertext, content contribution functionalities and structured ontologies.
At a simplistic level every teacher, every author, every librarian and every database manager is a creator of a knowledge environment.
On the other hand, the strengthening trend of public authorship leads to open-ended ontologies by means of, say, tagging or folksonomies.
In a significant sense, knowledge environments are in such cases created not only by their authors or owners but also by the contributors of their ontologies.