Semantic scout: Making sense of organizational knowledge

Abstract

Knowledge takes many forms in large organizations, and a unique opportunity exists to perform substantial integration of heterogeneous knowledge through semantic technologies. We present a sustainable method to create and maintain a data cloud that provides added value to an organization, while not interfering with existing practices. Our method shows one of the first application of knowledge-centric data access, following a web 3.0 paradigm. A use case has been implemented in a large research organization, based on explicit requirements. RDF-OWL datasets generated on the basis of a highly modular, pattern-based ontology are created, enriched by means of inferences and NLP techniques, and are integrated with linked open data. They are presented in different interaction modes that embrace important tasks such as navigation and search of organizational knowledge from any point, expert finding, competence matching etc. The tools implemented have been submitted to end-users for a task-based evaluation. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.