Knowledge provision with intelligent e-services

Interorganizational knowledge networks and knowledge marketplaces have emerged to enable organizations to share or commercially exploit their knowledge outside narrow organizational borders. The materialization of these structures requires concrete and sound mechanisms for the efficient external provision of knowledge stored in knowledge repositories within the organization. In our approach, we employ semantic Web services as a vehicle for publishing knowledge repositories. We propose “knowledge provision services” as a means for efficient retrieval and composition of knowledge objects from knowledge repositories of various organizational contexts regardless of the environment within which they are delivered. In this direction, we have extended OWL-S with a knowledge object ontology, which represents knowledge objects in a generic, application-neutral way, and we have developed an infrastructure for the publication, discovery, composition, and delivery of Knowledge Provision Services founded on the Web services architecture. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.