An enterprise ontology building the bases for automatic metadata generation

Abstract

'Information Overload' or 'Document Deluge' is a problem enterprises and Public Administrations alike are still dealing with. Although commercial products for Enterprise Content or Records Management are available since more than two decades, especially in Small and Medium Enterprises and Public Administrations they didn't get through. Because of the wide range of document types and formats full-text indexing is not sufficient, but assigning metadata manually is not possible. Thus, automatic, format-independent generation of metadata for (public) enterprise documents is needed. Using context to infer metadata automatically has been researched for example for web-documents or learning objects. If (public) enterprise objects were modelled 'machine understandable' they could be build the context for automatic metadata generation. The approach introduced in this paper is to model context (the (public) enterprise objects) in an ontology and using that ontology to infer content-related metadata. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.