Organizational Development for Knowledge Management at Water ...

Knowledge Ontology*
The conceptual framework that expresses the primary concepts and relationships among
those concepts in a particular area.
Supports: collaboration, knowledge sharing, search and retrieval
LEVEL OF EFFORT
SIZE OF UTILITY
SCOPE OF WORK
MED
SCALABLE
NARROW*
*FOUNDATIONAL FOR KNOWLEDE TAXONOMY
When we talk about a drinking water utility or a water system, we are actually considering all
the context and relationships to other concepts that provide a general understanding of these
topics for those familiar with the drinking water utility industry. For example, when engineers
talk about achieving high levels of water use efficiency, they do not have to keep asking how
this topic relates to regulatory approvals since that is common knowledge in the field. Yet, this
contextual link is critical to understand why controlling leakage is important and how it relates to
overall plant effectiveness. In contrast, a city planner may not have this knowledge and
therefore not understand why this is a priority to the drinking water industry. It is a group’s
common understanding of the concepts related to water use efficiency that provide the basis for
classifying topics and determining which ones are more general or more detailed to establish an
effective hierarchy. These concepts inherently have connections to many other concepts with
different strengths of relationships. Developing an ontology helps surface and understand these
relationships.
The ontology is translated into a hierarchy of descriptive categories that form the taxonomic
schemes used to structure the classification process. Even with a detailed taxonomy, the
classification scheme cannot convey the relative importance of the taxonomy nodes within the
document nor the relationship among the nodes, which is exactly the contextual information
needed to transform information into knowledge. The ontology provides this contextual
information.
For example, the Standard Subject Identification Code (SSIC) (used by the Department of the
Navy and other government organizations) has a node titled Data/Information under Operations
and Readiness. As a user, this can also describe an information technology system function
and therefore belongs under Information Technology or some other heading that starts with an
information theme. Similarly, this topic can be about new data storage techniques, both
hardware and software, and therefore belongs under a Research and Development heading.
Each case is correct and useful but it is difficult to determine which is best without more
knowledge on the context of how the topic is being used. One common method to alleviate
some of this discrepancy is to use a thesaurus of terms to augment the terms used for the
taxonomy nodes. This allows a wider set of words to form the basis of determining what is
relevant to a particular node in the same way as we might use synonyms and antonyms to help
someone understand a new word.
The TECHi2 paper Organizing Knowledge with Ontologies and Taxonomies talks about
ontologies and taxonomies in plain language. In the author’s words, you begin by defining a
structure to organize information into categories of main concepts, and then by terms to group
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