Innovation and Ontologies

156 Deployment in Business
Subsequently, two examples of knowledge management ontologies are described. The first,
O’CoMMA, studied the corporate memory of a company as corporate semantic web. It
developed support for the introduction of new employees as well as for the technology
monitoring process.
The second, (KA) 2 ontologies, pursued modeling of a community of researchers with the
ontologies built. Dealing with a research community implied a knowledge management approach
which went beyond corporate (or academic) boundaries. (KA) 2 is nonetheless described in this
subsection as the community, not the academic employers, is considered the relevant
organization. This can be illustrated by the fact that researchers worked towards a common goal.
2.3.2.1 Corporate Memory Management through Agents
O’CoMMA is the ontology developed in the EU project Corporate Memory Management through
Agents (CoMMA 188 ) which studied the corporate memory as a corporate semantic web (Gómez-
Pérez, Fernández-López & Corcho, 2002).
“CoMMA researched and implemented a prototype for a corporate memory management
framework based on several emerging technologies: agents, ontology engineering and
knowledge modeling, XML, information retrieval and machine learning.” (Perez et al., 2000)
CoMMA was interested in two scenarios: (1) assisting the insertion of new employees in the
company and (2) supporting the technology monitoring process (Perez et al., 2000). It aimed at a
highly flexible, modular and adaptive system. In this respect, multi-agent systems are very well
suited.
The ontological approach allows describing explicit models of the reality that agents can exploit
in their interactions. O’CoMMA provides an insight to the system through an organizational
model and user profiles described with ontological primitives (Gandon, 2002b).
The ontology is divided into three main layers (starting from the most specific level; cf. figure 51):
• Extension Layer. Specific to scenario and company, with internal complex concepts (e.g. new
employee fact sheet or product roll out schedule)
• Middle Layer. Large and continuously growing, consisting of a part which is generic to the
corporate memory domain (e.g. documents or people) and a part which is dedicated to the
specific topics of the application domain (e.g. marketing: product placement, TV spots etc.).
• Top Layer. A very generic top, similar to other general ontologies (cf. 5.2.4).
188
In his doctoral dissertation, Fabien Gandon (2002b) painstakingly documented both the approach adopted to build O'CoMMA (chapter 7)
and the resulting ontology (chapter 8).