A Semantically Enriched Competency Management System to Support the Analysis of a Web-based Research Network

While it is generally acknowledged that domain ontologies can significantly improve knowledge management systems (KMS) within organizations and among distributed web communities, we have little evidence of operational ontology-based KMS and their practical utility in real settings in the literature. We describe here the INTEROP KMap, a fully implemented, semantically indexed, competency management system, used to facilitate research collaboration and coordination of a Network of Excellence (NoE) on Enterprise Interoperability. Since the main highlighted advantages of ontologies are improved information access and interoperability, our aim in this paper is to give experimental support to these claims. We provide a summary description and usage data on the KMap, as well as experiments to quantify the added value of semantic search wrt traditional document ranking measures.