© 2008, Sam Chapman, K-Now and the University of Sheffield 1 1 Creating and Using Organisational Semantic Webs in Large Networked Organisations Ravish

© 2008, Sam Chapman, K-Now and the University of Sheffield 1

1Creating and Using Organisational Semantic Webs in Large Networked Organisations

Ravish Bhagdev1,2, Ajay Chakravarthy1, Sam Chapman1,2, Fabio Ciravegna1,2 and Vita Lanfranchi1

1 2

University of Sheffield, UK{N.Surname}@shef.ac.uk

Knowledge Now Limited, UK{Name}@k-now.co.uk


Outline

Traditional Knowledge Management What is problematic?

Large Networked Organisations What are the organisational needs?

Knowledge Acquisition

Forms as Ontologies

Form-based Knowledge Capture

Knowledge Sharing and Reuse

Conclusions


Traditional KM

Enterprise Knowledge Portal providing unique standardized access to

proprietary knowledge

Single Conceptual Schema for official agreed view

supporting communication between different parts of organisation

Large homogeneous knowledge or document repositories for collection and organisation of corporate

knowledge


Traditional KM: Issues

Effect: Many portals are deserted by users

replacements: non-official tools such as shared directories, personalized and local databases, email, etc.

Reason: Difficulty in adopting models, schemas and

procedures that are unsuitable to specific communities

of users that are not dynamic


Large Networked Organisations

Modern KM is based on dynamic communities that acquire and share knowledge

according to dedicated schemas existing across traditional organisational

boundaries ill fit pre-determined standard

schemas require rapidly tailoring knowledge for

their specific ad-hoc uses often outside the company

(outsourcing)

Organisation2

Organisation2

Organisation1

Organisation1


Modern KM principles

Principle of Autonomy where each unit is granted a high degree of

autonomy to manage their local knowledge;

Principle of coordination where units are enabled to exchange knowledge

with other units through a mechanism of mapping other units’ context onto their local context.

Bonifacio et al, 2002


Challenge: support communities in capturing knowledge

Do not force communities to share a single company-wide (ontological) view

Help them define a neat, formal, shareable, individual ontological view that can be connected to other views

although connections can be imperfect some is better than nothing


Challenge: support communities in sharing and reusing knowledge

Distributed interconnected resources can be queried across via interconnected

ontologies Searching metadata rather than text

Retrieving information independently from the store/media

Enables querying resources using my ontological view largely independently from the view used

originally to create it


Semantic Web for Networked Communities Enables freedom for communities

definition of community-specific views of the world; capture and acquisition of knowledge according to

them; easy networked modification of the knowledge

schema

Enables sharing with other communities integration with the rest of the organisation’s

knowledge; via integration of ontologies

definition and reuse of different views on the same data

great number of small ontological components

consisting largely of pointers to each other


Our proposal:Integrate knowledge acquisition, capturing and

sharing

K-FormsForm based User centred community specific view

definition of knowledge structures, i.e. the ontologycreation of instances, i.e. triples

K-ExtractionLegacy data capture

K-Searchsearching and sharing of information and knowledge.


KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION AND CAPTURE

K-Forms


K-Forms Users define Web based forms visually using a Web

browser

Forms

Tables

Selections

Lists

Conceptual type

Possible values

Validation required

etc.

Same freedom as Word/Excel forms

Flexible creation/modification of knowledge schema


Sharing among forms When a form is created parts of other forms are suggested

intelligently for reuse to help users:

create forms consistently without forgetting anything reduce time (saves specifying all details) encourage sharing and linkage

People tend to develop new forms starting from an existing form and reuse components from others


FORMS AS ONTOLOGIES

The technical view


Forms as ontologies

The form schema is turned automatically into an explicit ontology

Objects are OWL concepts

Properties are OWL properties if filler is base type OWL Relations if filler is a nested object

Forms can be divided into sections and fields.

15


Sections

Sections can have subsections and fieldsare presented as sub-forms to be filled.

Sections are represented as OWL classes (<ConceptName> Class) which can have subsections (related classes) or individual fields (properties)


FieldsFields are typed represent meta-properties of the document (e.g. author,

date, etc.) or its content (e.g. an issue to be reported).

Fields can be added as a property of each section, subsection, or directly in form classesthey are represented as OWL properties.

Restrictions can be set for the possible values of the using xml datatype schema (xsd:types)


Semantic interconnections

Relations among concepts are represented as OWL relations between classes and properties

Relational tables can be represented as advanced sections.

The domain of some relations may be the overarching <FormName> Class. When concepts are introduced at the top level, a

relation is formally created domain <FormName> Class and range <ConceptName> Class.


Linking ontologies When part of form is reused,

underlying ontology matching tool imports OWL concepts, relations and properties

This creates a semantic web of ontologies all the SW technologies used for managing

distributed ontologies apply e.g. distributed searching


FORM-BASED KNOWLEDGE CAPTURE

The technical view


Knowledge Capturing

When a form is released users receive it to fillcapture locally(no intranet connection)upload to central repository in a later time

Final Word/Excel document automatically generated Can be read and printed and sent by email

as before

Knowledge immediately available for search on the intranet


Filling forms Semantics are assigned to the field

values All the inputted values are transformed

into RDF statements related to the form ontology

Filling forms creates RDF triples Different types of documents can be

generated from the triples


How about Legacy Data? Legacy data in unstructured sources

must be recovered Access to knowledge captured with K-

Forms must be seamlessly integrated with that extracted from legacy data (when possible)

Requirement: extracting information from existing forms

Method: Use of automatic semantic annotation

techniques Mainly from Information Extraction from

text


KNOWLEDGE SHARING AND REUSEK-Search


K-SearchOntology based search for documents and

knowledgeSeamlessly searching forms and knowledge

extractedFully integrated with K-Forms & K-ExtractionOntology associated to a form is made available to K-

Search


Hybrid Search Keywords and ontology-based search can be mixed

within the same query Pure ontology-based searching

When metadata covers information precisely

Keyword-in-context of annotation To match strings in text annotated with semantics (textual form

fields)

e.g. “fuel” is matched only on snippets of texts annotated as removed parts

General Keyword querying For searching on the document/form as a whole

Vitaveska Lanfranchi, Ravish Bhagdev, Sam Chapman, Fabio Ciravegna, Daniela Petrelli: Extracting and Searching Knowledge for the Aerospace Industry, in Proc. of 1st European Semantic Technology Conference, Vienna, May 2007


Support for dynamic communitiesK-Search enables searching multiple repositories

at once using one of the available ontologiesQuery a specific resource via the original ontologyQuery a resource using a different ontology interconnected to the

original oneQuery multiple repositories using one specific ontology.


Support for dynamic communitiesWhen an ontology different from the original is

usedthe original query is mapped to the original ontology via

the formal links. For the parts that are not mapped the restrictions can be

turned into keywords


Bookmarking in Search


Bookmarking (ctd)

© 2008, Sam Chapman, K-Now and the University of Sheffield 31© 2008, Sam Chapman, K-Now and the University of Sheffield

User Evaluation: K-Forms6 Users from our universityUsers reused in average 60% of the possible

concepts. Many individual variations, with a peak of 80% and a

minimum of 30% concepts reuse.

All the users happily reused their own conceptsReuse of concepts was appreciated by 90% of

the users as it saves timeUsers found easy or very easy (66.7% ) to design

a form using the system (33.3 % rated it average)

Industrial:Rolls-Royce forms, + (all k-now) + weknowit


User Evaluation: K-Search32 Users at Rolls-Royce plc

Finalist at Rolls-Royce directors’ creativity award

STANDARDISED

EVALUATION

ISO DIS 9241-11


Conclusions

K-Forms and K-Search provide support for KM in dynamic communitiesK-Forms enables the intuitive design and deployment of web-based

forms that capture semantic information. K-Search enables accessing multiple repositories using multiple

ontologies

K-Forms and K-Search satisfy modern KM supportingPrinciple of Autonomy Principle of coordination


Future Work

Further development of the concept of the networked ontologies and their impact on knowledge management.

Explore the impact of changes to the existing form schema when some forms have been already filled.

Industrial Applications 2 projects: Support to design and manufacturing of

Rolls Royce Engine for Airbus 350 International Procurement Analysis Sports & Entertainments Industry Customer

Management


Acknowledgments. The work was supported by :

IPAS, a project jointly funded by the UK DTI (Ref. TP/2/IC/6/I/10292) and Rolls-Royce plc and

X-Media, an Integrated Project on large scale knowledge management across media, funded by the European Commission as part of the IST programme (IST-FP6-026978), (www.x-media-project.org).

All images © (K-Now or Rolls Royce)


Thank you and Questions?

[email protected]

Documents

© 2008, Sam Chapman, K-Now and the University of Sheffield 1 1 Creating and Using Organisational Semantic Webs in Large Networked Organisations Ravish