Efficient Knowledge Management by Extending the Semantic Web with Local Completeness Reasoning

In this post-industrial “information economy” more and more organizations are realizing that having actionable information gives them an invaluable competitive advantage. The term “intellectual asset” has been coined to reflect the significance of this type of information. The field of knowledge management (KM) provides tools, techniques and processes for the most effective use of an organization’s intellectual assets [Davies 00]. But the advent of the Web and its subsequent ubiquity has fueled a rapid growth in information volume that has not slowed down. In fact, in addition to the more traditional web pages, we now have information from diverse sources like databases, sensors, web services and even intelligent agents. This diversity of data sources combined with the trends in division of labor in modern companies lead to a knowledge space that is highly distributed and ever changing. The traditional KM tools assumed a centralized knowledge repository and therefore are not suitable for this distributed knowledge medium [van Elst et. al. 03]. New KM tools are needed that integrate the knowledge sources dispersed across web into a coherent corpus of interrelated information.