pdf 820Kb - INSEAD CALT

Evaluation report of the use of Onto-Logging
platform in the user site
Deliverable ID: D8b
Page : 23 of 110
Version: 1.0
Date: 27 january 2004
Status: Final
Confid.: Public
Knowledge management systems represent technical infrastructures and methods that can be
used to support a set of this knowledge activities and processes.
Note:
Our definition of knowledge is very broad, and refers to any form of information which
embed some context and some level of actionability. Knowledge may refer to some form of
intellectual assets that people can activate in other to generate new objects, but also to
processes (knowledge process, organizational knowledge) that in embedded in the
functioning of the organization.
What is an Ontology?
Ontology represent a proposed approach for representing knowledge.
"An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization.” (Gruber, 1993)
“An ontology provides an explicit representation for structuring all the entities and
relationships that are to be talked about in some domain” (Bateman, 2004).
More concretely, ontology propose a conceptual framework that provide the capability:
• To model deeply the knowledge (semantic web) making the search more powerful
(possibility to define more precise requests) and less ambiguous (less noise).
• To evolve relatively easily. Ontology technologies support the change in the structure
of the knowledge without impacting (or at least in a very localized way) the whole
system.
• To interoperate: Ontology models provide very clear and rigorous interfaces, which
facilitate the interoperability between different systems. Besides, mapping
mechanisms allowing ontologies translation from one ontology to another can help
the connection of systems that implement similar knowledge & data models but that
were defined separately.
• To help to structure the knowledge processes in organization by contributing to the
establishment of a common language. Ontology provides the means to define
unambiguously the different terms of a domain.
Ontology technologies / systems (such as Ontology editors) are just some tools that have
been design to support this approach.
Practically, Ontology systems & technolo gies propose mechanisms that help:
• The definition of ontologies formalizing a target domain (the semantic of this domain
is explicitly defined).
• The use of these ontologies to formalize explicitly the different knowledge objects
(documents, practices, people, etc.) of the domain addressed.
• Semantic search of the different knowledge objects (the queries express the semantic,
and not only the existence of keywords).