Extended topic map: Knowledge collaborative building for distributed knowledge resource

The characteristics of information resources are distributed, autonomous, heterogeneous and full of semantics in complex knowledge-based organizations at the era of knowledge economy. In order to realize efficient knowledge acquisition, representation, exchange, and sharing, we propose a novel concept of extended topic map, which extends the conventional topic map in structure. It embodies the multi-level, multi-granularity and other inherent relevant characteristics of knowledge. With the extended topic map as infrastructure, the framework of knowledge collaborative building in distributed scenario is achieved by the following four stages: knowledge extraction, local extended topic map generation, similarity calculation and global extended topic map generation. We give the key technologies of each stage, which take advantage of extended topic map-based techniques such as comprehensive information theory based similarity measure and merging strategies. Finally, an example of multi-resource knowledge integration based on extended topic map is given to elaborate the knowledge collaborative building process.