Corporate Semantic Collaboration
In semantic collaboration we research methods and tools to model knowledge collaboratively and share it in a company. Current tools support collaboration only on selected datatypes, e.g., group calendar, and files, e.g., document archive. An exchange of data between different applications is cumbersome and difficult. To address this problem we employ ontologies as a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective means for integrating data.We look at the following four topics:
Knowledge Extraction by Mining User Activities
If people work on projects they usually produce electronic artefacts and group them into folders. Furthermore, they communicate with other people, which also work on that project or are somehow related to the topic of the project, e.g., exchanging electronic artefacts. Mining these activities of a user may reveal some facts (implicit knowledge) about the project that have not been put down in writing. In this work package we develop algorithms and tools to mine the activities of users and make implicit knowledge explicit, e.g., create statements and store them in a knowledge base. Afterwards, this knowledge can be used to improve other algorithms and tools, e.g., to enhance search engines in enterprises.Technologies
Collaborative Tool for Modelling Ontologies and Knowledge
While the term ontology is widely understood as a shared and formal specification of a conceptualization, the term knowledge is vaguely defined. In the project Corporate Semantic Web we define knowledge as a network of skills and capabilities used to solve a task. Our working group researches methods and processes to collaboratively manage ontologies and knowledge, especially we will consider concurrent access to ontologies, provide user-specific views on the knowledge, and support communication between users.
Technologies
Dynamic Access to Distributed Knowledge
Start: 2011-01Evolution of Ontologies and Knowledge by Collaborative Activities
The employees of a company are important assets because they have know-how about processes and workflows within the company as well as knowledge about customers. Often the know-how and knowledge is only accessible by one person - the person who gained the experience. In literature the authors refer to knowledge that is difficult to transfer between individuals as tacit knowledge. Knowledge management (KM) is the technological and organizational approach to counter this effect. Its purpose is to make implicit knowledge explicit and to make it usable for other people.
From the presented perceptions of knowledge management we conclude that organizations will have to use some approaches to represent the corporate knowledge explicitly. To ensure that the knowledge assets are understood easily they also have to ensure a shared understanding of their application domain. Semantic technologies provide means to support the goal of creating a shared understanding, e.g., ontologies, standardized data model for representing and exchanging information as well as rule languages. Over time knowledge represented with ontologies and rules has to be updated because the understanding of the application domain changes and evolves, e.g., a company will develop new products, acquire new customers, or establish new workflows.
Despite some missing features, from a technological viewpoint current methodologies and tools can be used to create and maintain knowledge and ontologies collaboratively. However, in a corporate environment we rarely find them in use. In our opinion the reason is that employees have to study semantic technologies in advance to understand these methodologies and to operate the rather complex user interface of semantic based tools. Organizations need easy-to-use tools which fit to their needs. Thus, we will not develop new knowledge management system in the working package. Instead, we develop new concepts of interaction with semantic tools to reduce the complexity of creating semantically enriched content and managing ontologies.