Semantic-Web-Based Knowledge Management

From IEEE Internet Computing, Sept./Oct. 2007

John Davies • British Telecommunications

Miltiadis Lytras • University of Patras, Greece

Amit P. Sheth • Wright State University

Hundreds of millions of users can now access several billion documents on the Web, and even larger data sets reside in organizations’ intranets and Web-accessible databases (the so-called deep Web). As the amount of available data continues to grow rapidly, it’s increasingly difficult for users to find, organize, access, and maintain the information they require.

At the same time, the notion of the Semantic Web1 promises to make Web-accessible data more amenable to machine processing. The Semantic Web is about labeling (annotating) information so that computer systems (and humans) can process it more meaningfully. The semantics underlying such annotations usually come from ontologies, which encapsulate agreement among information creators and users with help from common nomenclature and the use of rich knowledge representation. Just as the Semantic Web (also called Web 3.0) is beginning to empower and energize content on the Web, the underlying principles and technologies can energize and enhance the long-standing knowledge-management discipline. In this special issue of IC, we’re particularly interested in the new possibilities the Semantic Web affords for improved knowledge management...

Trends in knowledge management... Semantic-based knowledge management... continue reading

See also in this issue - IEEE Internet Computing, Sept./Oct. 2007:
The five articles selected for this special issue summarize our view of the Semantic Web’s strategic role toward more effective knowledge management. They provide sound propositions for supporting knowledge management at several levels. At the individual and artifact level, they highlight the concepts of automatic metadata extraction and service-oriented metadata management; at the group and organizational level, they promote the significance of peer-to-peer networks; and at the interorganizational level, they investigate ontologies’ significance.

In “Requirements and Services for Metadata Management,” the authors identify general requirements for metadata management and describe a simple model and service to address these requirements, with specific focus on RDF metadata.

In “Extracting Relevant Attribute Values for Improved Search,” the authors propose a new kind of metadata—relevant values—that provides a synthesized view of an attribute’s values directly extracted from the data.

“GridVine: An Infrastructure for Peer Information Management” describes a semantic overlay infrastructure based on a peer-to-peer access structure. In GridVine, users can query heterogeneous but semantically related information sources transparently using iterative query reformulation. The authors discuss their experiences using GridVine as a substrate for sharing semantic information.

“Using Semantic Web Technologies to Analyze Learning Content” demonstrates how Semantic Web technologies can improve the state of the art in learning environments and bridge the gap between students and learning content authors or teachers. The authors' ontological framework helps formalize the notion of learning object context.

Finally, in “Harvesting Wiki Consensus: Using Wikipedia Entries as Vocabulary for Knowledge Management,” the authors show that standard wikis are suitable platforms for the collaborative development of vocabularies that can be used to annotate documents. They prove that Wikipedia entries’ URIs are surprisingly reliable identifiers for conceptual entities.

The latest Semantic Web developments and insights in knowledge management challenge the new era of semantic-based knowledge-management systems. Semantic Web tools and applications contribute significantly to knowledge management’s performance, providing a definition for flexible reference mechanisms to knowledge objects and knowledge contributors;7
integration of knowledge creation and use;8,9
integral human involvement in information- and knowledge-management activities;10 and
a definition for and the exploitation of social networks, including social activities and context.2,11 continue reading

On the same shelf & aisle: A. Sheth and S. Stephens, “Semantic Web: Technologies and Applications for the Real World,” World Wide Web Conf. tutorial, 2007. (Also available at http://knoesis.wright.edu/library/presentations/WWW2007-Sheth-Stephens-Tutorial-Final.ppt.)