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.
LvE, 28.03.2000