Knowledge Management: Knowledge Management: The On-To-Knowledge ProjectThe On-To-Knowledge Project

Hans AkkermansHans Akkermans

Free University Amsterdam VUA

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What is On-To-Knowledge?

European project in EU Information Society Technologies Programme: EU-IST-10132

Aim: innovative tools for knowledge management Duration: 2.5 years, January 2000 - June 2002 Total effort & cost: 26 personyears, 2.5+ M EUR EC funding: 1.34 M EUR

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OTK Partners

Free Univ. Amsterdam (VUA, coordinator), NL

British Telecom, UK Swiss Life, CH Aidministrator, NL CognIT, NO EnerSearch, SE AIFB Uni-Karlsruhe, D

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What is Knowledge Management? (1/2)

Peter Drucker: Post-capitalist Society (1993) Peter Drucker: Post-capitalist Society (1993) “The change in the meaning of knowledgechange in the meaning of knowledge that began 250

years ago has transformed society and economy. Formal knowledge is seen as both the key personal resource and the key economic resource. Knowledge is the only meaningful Knowledge is the only meaningful resource today.resource today. The traditional `factors of production' - land (i.e. natural resources), labour and capital - have not disappeared. But they have become secondary. They can be obtained, and obtained easily, provided there is knowledge. And knowledge in this new meaning is knowledge as a utility, knowledge as the means to obtain social and economic results. These developments, whether desirable or not, are responses to an irreversible change: knowledge is now knowledge is now being applied to knowledgebeing applied to knowledge.”

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What is Knowledge Management? (2/2)

Identify Plan AcquireDevelop

DistributeFosteruse

Maintain,Controlquality

Dispose

Aim of Knowledge Management:Aim of Knowledge Management: Increase the leverage of corporate knowledge, Increase the leverage of corporate knowledge,

as a key production factor in the organizationas a key production factor in the organization

Aim of Knowledge Management:Aim of Knowledge Management: Increase the leverage of corporate knowledge, Increase the leverage of corporate knowledge,

as a key production factor in the organizationas a key production factor in the organization

The knowledge value chainThe knowledge value chain

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Exploiting World-Wide Information Resources IT, and especially Internet/WWW, have boosted

potential for knowledge acquisition and sharing BUT:BUT: information resources are heterogeneous,

distributed, semi-structured, & enormous in size HENCE:HENCE: need for KM tools for selective semantic

(meaning-oriented) access => On-To-KnowledgeOn-To-Knowledge Move from keyword search to query answeringMove from keyword search to query answering Move upwards in the data-info-knowledge chainMove upwards in the data-info-knowledge chain Vision:Vision: toward the next-generation “semantic”

(Tim Berners-Lee, W3C) or knowledge webknowledge web

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OTK Results (1/2)

Tools:Tools: Intranet/WWW

information extraction

Semantic representation & analysis

User query access

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OTK Results (2/2)

MethodologyMethodology (inputs: e.g. our KE&M book, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000)

Industrial case studies:Industrial case studies: evaluation and feedback

OIL:OIL: XML/RDF-based ontology language plus inference layer on top of the web

Note: see Chapter 9 for EnerSearch case study on

agent communication

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What is an Ontology?

In philosophy: theory of what exists in the world

In IT: formal description of shared formal description of shared concepts in a domainconcepts in a domain

Aid to human communication and shared understanding, by specifying meaning

Machine-processable (e.g., agents use ontologies in communication)

Ontology = key technology in Ontology = key technology in semantic information processingsemantic information processing

Application: knowledge management, e-business

A “Society” of Intelligent Devices

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OTK Tool Environment and its Use

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Project Roles of OTK Partners

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EnerSearch Case Study: Virtual Enterprise (1/3)

How to do knowledge How to do knowledge transfer via website?transfer via website?

Issue:Issue: hyperlinks or keyword search do not tell you much, and are a waste of time

Much better:Much better: you want to ask questions and just get the answer

Note: EnerSearch website hyperlink structure

does not really help!

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EnerSearch Case Study: What You CanCan Do (2/3) Annotate documents or

webpages with meaning (through ontology)

Note: taxonomy or type hierarchy is simple(st) form of ontology

Next: semantic clustering of pages gives content-based organization

Automatically done by one of the OTK tools: Aidministrator’s WebMaster

Note: EnerSearch website ontology gives organization of

important topics (Excerpt)

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EnerSearch Case Study: Preliminary Results (3/3)

Author relations

Agent subtype structure

Interactive generation of subtype intersections

(here, e-commerce)

Key idea:Key idea: website hyperlinks + ontology = meaningful structure

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EnerSearch Case Study: Involvement of Shareholders Request to participate in

evaluation of OTK tools User query interface tool:

ask questions rather than browse or search

Test/evaluation feedback to On-To-Knowledge

=> Improve EnerSearch website as a knowledge transfer medium

Ontology helps separatetwo different meanings of

“communication”

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