ON TO KNOWLEDGE: Tools for content-driven knowledge management through evolving ontologies

• Forschungsstelle: EU FRP
• Projektnummer: 99.0174
• Projekttitel Englisch: ON TO KNOWLEDGE: Tools for content-driven knowledge management through evolving ontologies

Schlüsselwörter (Englisch)

Ontologies; knowledge management; semantic web; organisational memory; intranets;description logics; XML; RDF

Alternative Projektnummern (Englisch)

EU project number: IST-1999-10132

Forschungsprogramme (Englisch)

EU-programme: 5. Frame Research Programme - 1.2.4 Essential technologies and infrastructures

Kurzbeschreibung (Englisch)

See abstract

Partner und Internationale Organisationen (Englisch)

Coordinator: Free University Amsterdam (NL)

Abstract (Englisch)

Ontologies have been developed in knowledge engineering as a means to share and reuse knowledge. The On-To-Knowledge project developed methods and tools to employ the full power of existing ontology technology to facilitate efficient knowledge management. The tools will help employees to better access information repositories. The toolkit aims at two goals. First, access to knowledge must be simple and effective. Second, the On-To-Knowledge tools must be applicable to large bodies of textual and semi-structured information sources, thus supporting information access and maintenance for intranets with tens of thousands of pages using large and distributed ontologies. This will ensure that the On-To-Knowledge tools are applicable on a company-wide scale. The project develops a three-layered tool environment to achieve these goals. The layers correspond to the extraction of information from various knowledge sources, the representation of that information, and its querying. A methodology will complement the toolkit, giving guidelines for how to apply those tools in real knowledge management projects.
Three major case studies are used to evaluate and improve the results, the main case study being done in Swiss Life. This case study aims at two different kinds of applications. The first one is a skills management system that is based on skills descriptions on employees' home pages on the intranet. The On-To-Knowledge tools have been used to create the skills ontology, the automatic annotation of the home pages, and a context-sensitive retrieval. The skills management application also gives input to developing a methodology for manual ontology construction. The second application aims at a semi-automatic construction of an ontology for the International Accounting Standard (IAS) from documents dealing with IAS. Since IAS uses a specific vocabulary, users who want to search documents about IAS for certain topics need to be supported by allowing them to browse that vocabulary to formulate their query or to refine it later on.
The utilization of terminology-based RDF annotations allows in the skills management system as well as in the IAS search application to focus a query to a certain context. This results in a tremendous imrpovement in retrieval quality over standard freetext retrieval. In both applications the annotations are generated automaitcally. In the skills management system this is due to a predefined document template which is pre-annotated, in the IAS Search this is done by a wrapper that interprets textual structure and accordingly assigns RDF facts to the document.

Datenbankreferenzen (Englisch)

Swiss Database: Euro-DB of the
State Secretariat for Education and Research
Hallwylstrasse 4
CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland
Tel. [phone]
Swiss Project-Number: 99.0174