Ontology Development for Flexible Content Submitted to HICSS-33 Minitrack on System Support For Electronic Business On Internet

Competitive environment in converging digital media industry is changing rapidly. This calls for tighter integration of creativity, business processes, and technologies. Media companies need flexible methods to manage electronic content production and delivery, and metadata is a key enabler in making this goal a reality. However, metadata is useful only if its nature is understood clearly and its structure and usage are well-defined. The management of common vocabularies is one of the key issues in blocking electronic publishing as well as other automated business interactions in the electronic world. For this purpose, an ontology, consisting of conceptual models that map the content domain into a limited set of meaningful concepts, is needed. The result is a high-level semantic description captured in document metadata. Moreover, since the metadata is defined in multiple dimensions that each have their own conceptual model, this explicit typing of descriptive data can be used directly in applications and services that utilize semantic metadata, such as information filtering and information augmentation. This paper introduces an ontology development framework rooted at the core business processes of electronic publishing that can be used when defining semantic metadata structures for electronic content. The framework underlines the different nature of ontology development and metadata publishing, and how these two processes influence each other. This paper discusses also the application of the ontology development framework in practice. The framework has been created in the SmartPush project, where media companies explore new business opportunities for electronic publishing and delivery.