Ontology-based Content Management in a Virtual Organization

Abstract

In this paper we describe an ontology-based content management and re-trieval system, a kind of Document-based Corporate Memory. This system has been realized in the setting of a virtual organization, a new kind of business partnership at the forefront of ontology-based Knowledge Management due to the special needs for organizing corporate knowledge using flexible, but well-understood and machine processable structures. The goal of our development was to improve on the traditional ways of managing both information items (documents, in our case) and domain knowledge used to organize information, while minimizing the additional effort required from content managers and knowledge workers. In order to evaluate our methods, we designed and carried out a field experiment that compared the effectiveness of the ontology-based search and browse methods to the traditional way of information seeking. Our results show that with appropriate interfaces it is possible to outperform keyword-based search methods even by using less formal, lightweight ontologies obtained through automated extraction.