As this is an often asked question: the product naming was preceded by a company-wide brainstorming.

The winning idea based the name on the word “phoneme”.

A phoneme is the smallest, abstract unit of sound in speech that distinguishes meaning between words, such as the /p/ and /b/ in "pat" and "bat". English contains approximately 44 distinct phonemes, which are represented by various letters or combinations of letters (graphemes). These sound units are foundational in linguistics for studying pronunciation and phonology.

We liked this idea, that a phoneme basically represents information or meaning in speech as we find this pretty suiting for a knowledge management system. The extension “-os” is just an artificial ending, turning the base word into an abstract, invented word.