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6 Discussion and Conclusions
Evaluation report of the use of Onto-Logging
platform in the user site
Deliverable ID: D8b
Page : 69 of 110
Version: 1.0
Date: 27 january 2004
Status: Final
Confid.: Public
Concluding the work and outcome of the Ontologging project, which the evaluation has
helped to determine, appears to be difficult:
On one hand, the technical objectives of this project have been fulfilled: a whole set of tools
relying on ontology based technologies that provide support to many of the very important
dimensions of the knowledge processes have been elaborated. These tools provides the means
to define “knowledge schema” that will be used to structure the organization of the
knowledge in a KM system, to populate this system with content, to retrieve this knowledge,
and finally to evaluate this knowledge as well as the different knowledge processes being
conducted in the system. Even if some room for improvement still remains, the design of
ontology-based knowledge management systems does not appear an unachievable overtaking.
From this perspective, moving to a productisation phase would not to raise any major
difficulties, given in particular the fact that most of the technological building blocks for
designing these systems are now available.
On the other hand, this project has “kind of ” revealed a real “Pandora box”: Ontology
oriented knowledge management systems are radically different systems than the traditional
document centric knowledge management system of today, and raises many more nontechnical
issues that are not particular trivial to solve.
For instance the design of the structure (ontology building) is difficult, and require time. In
the case of the Ontologging project, it took several months and a major redesign to obtain a
correct domain Ontology. (Missikoff, Navigli and Velardi, 2002) indicates that it took one
year for the project Harmonize project to release their first domain Ontology (in the domain
of tourisms) that comprises about 300 concepts. Even if we can obviously imagine that in the
later case the participants were not dedicating all their time on this design (they also
mentioned some techniques that have helped to reduced considerably this time), ontology
design is a complex operation that requires time and expertise.
In a similar way, the ontology content population requires also an important amount of effort
and rigor, and cannot be improvised. Hence, in the Ontologging project, the first
(unsupervised) population resulted in a result that was barely usable. Indeed, Ontology
systems appear also to be less tolerant to low quality and noise than more traditional
information-centred systems. The solution that was finally adopted to have the content
population be accomplished by a reduced and specialised team, was working all right, but
seems to go against the general idea that all the employees should participate to the
knowledge capitalisation process and contribute to enrich the repository of knowledge of the
company. Even if this solution is only temporary, some investigation needs to be
accomplished to make possible the collaborative capitalization process.
Finally, the retrieval of this knowledge is also more complex (but also richer) and prone to
dispersion, since it goes much beyond the use of search mechanisms but also include the
navigation in a maze of node of information elements connected to one another, and the more