Organisational Memory : A Knowledge Modelling Approa

It has become very important for advanced organisat ions to make the best use of information gathered from various document sources inside companies and from external sources like the Internet. There are three stages in the information life cycle: fin ding, organising and sharing. Many technologies hav e been developed for the finding stage. On the other hand, there is a lack of efficient technologies focused on organising and sharing of existing knowl edge. Conceptual modelling and model based information re trieval shall improve the entire information life cycle. Knowledge modelling approach assumes that th ere will be a conceptual description of an application domain, so called domain model, describ ing concepts as company's activities, projects, customers, employees, and so on, as well as relatio ns among these concepts. The main purpose of this model is to use a set of pre-defined concepts to express kno wledge in concern to a particular information source. In this way it is possible to m ake explicit the context of various documents in order to interpret their content correctly. Thus, t he domain model can be understood as a shared vocabulary of company-specific terms to represent, organise and communicate knowledge within a company. In this paper KnowWeb, European Commission funded r esearch project, is briefly introduced. The project focuses on the storage of knowledge in a co rporate organisational memory and retrieval of relevant knowledge chunks from this memory. The ret rieval is based on company-specific conceptual terms instead of traditional keywords. The employed knowledge-based approach enables searching not only in the physical document space but also in the document context space. The paper consists of three main parts. In the firs t one the project goals are identified, in the foll owing sections generic architecture and functionality of the KnowWeb toolkit are introduced. In the concluding part of the paper we discuss pilot appli cations and feasibility of projects like KnowWeb.