An Approach to Extracting Knowledge from Legacy Documents

Organisations are increasingly information intensive; hence providing access to data that is trapped in various proprietary forms including catalogues, databases, human resource systems and internally generated documents is now becoming a significant and challenging task. The authors have undertaken research into approaches to capture relevant knowledge from legacy documents. This is achieved by converting the legacy documents to XML, (eXtensible Markup Language), documents where the output is semantically tagged. Once in an XML form, the data can be easily transformed. This paper describes the development of tools to automate the process of converting legacy documents to XML documents. The purpose of this work is improve the efficiency and reliability of Expertise Finder suitable for use within an engineering design environment. We will also show that by querying the resultant XML versions of legacy documents provides better results than a basic text search over the identical documents when applied used within an Expertise Finder. Keyword: Knowledge management, Expertise finders, XML.