Some Previous and Current Work in Ontologies

Ontologies in Organizational Memories (within KnowMore)

Within a knowledge management scenario, ontologies play an important role as they provide a shared vocabulary and thereby a basis for discourse between the various actors (human and artificial).
In the KnowMore project, ontologies were applied as a uniform mechanism to describe the information objects of the organizational memory with respect to their content (domain ontologies) as well as with repect to their context, e.g. creation context or applicability (process and enterprise ontologies) and structural properties, e.g. format (information ontologies). These descriptions were used for context-sensitive information access and delivery. In KnowMore, we used our own representation formalism (OCRA, object-centered relational algebra) for ontologies. An ontology editor was developed that supported the construction process by proposing relations between concepts on the basis of a similarity thesaurus.

Ontology Acquisition for Distributed Organizational Memories (within FRODO)

FRODO is the successor project of KnowMore. It extends the KnowMore scenario by taking into account that in an enterprise environment there probably exist several organizational memories. The comprehensive use of these different organizational memories asks several questions concerning acquisition, maintenance and integration of ontologies.
We will develop a tool for the text-based acquisition and evolution of domain ontologies in organizational memories. Special attention will be paid to the application of distributed ontologies. It will be investigated how search heuristics and other reasoning services can exploit domain ontologies to accomplish special tasks within the organizational memories. RDF-Schema will probably form the representational basis for our ontologies.