Davies, J.; Duke, A.; Stonkus, A.: OntoShare: evolving ontologies in a knowledge sharing system (2004)
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- Abstract
- We saw in the introduction how the Semantic Web makes possible a new generation of knowledge management tools. We now turn our attention more specifically to Semantic Web based support for virtual communities of practice. The notion of communities of practice has attracted much attention in the field of knowledge management. Communities of practice are groups within (or sometimes across) organizations who share a common set of information needs or problems. They are typically not a formal organizational unit but an informal network, each sharing in part a common agenda and shared interests or issues. In one example it was found that a lot of knowledge sharing among copier engineers took place through informal exchanges, often around a water cooler. As well as local, geographically based communities, trends towards flexible working and globalisation have led to interest in supporting dispersed communities using Internet technology. The challenge for organizations is to support such communities and make them effective. Provided with an ontology meeting the needs of a particular community of practice, knowledge management tools can arrange knowledge assets into the predefined conceptual classes of the ontology, allowing more natural and intuitive access to knowledge. Knowledge management tools must give users the ability to organize information into a controllable asset. Building an intranet-based store of information is not sufficient for knowledge management; the relationships within the stored information are vital. These relationships cover such diverse issues as relative importance, context, sequence, significance, causality and association. The potential for knowledge management tools is vast; not only can they make better use of the raw information already available, but they can sift, abstract and help to share new information, and present it to users in new and compelling ways.
In this chapter, we describe the OntoShare system which facilitates and encourages the sharing of information between communities of practice within (or perhaps across) organizations and which encourages people - who may not previously have known of each other's existence in a large organization - to make contact where there are mutual concerns or interests. As users contribute information to the community, a knowledge resource annotated with meta-data is created. Ontologies defined using the resource description framework (RDF) and RDF Schema (RDFS) are used in this process. RDF is a W3C recommendation for the formulation of meta-data for WWW resources. RDF(S) extends this standard with the means to specify domain vocabulary and object structures - that is, concepts and the relationships that hold between them. In the next section, we describe in detail the way in which OntoShare can be used to share and retrieve knowledge and how that knowledge is represented in an RDF-based ontology. We then proceed to discuss in Section 10.3 how the ontologies in OntoShare evolve over time based on user interaction with the system and motivate our approach to user-based creation of RDF-annotated information resources. The way in which OntoShare can help to locate expertise within an organization is then described, followed by a discussion of the sociotechnical issues of deploying such a tool. Finally, a planned evaluation exercise and avenues for further research are outlined.
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