Ontology-based knowledge management

The Web´s very popularity is making it more difficult to find, present, and maintain the data that users with a wide range of tasks and computer skills need. Existing document management systems use keyword matching as a search method, combined with information retrieval rather than query answering. In addition, these systems offer limited information-sharing facilities, and they do not support different views on documents or information maintenance. To address these weaknesses, a European consortium formed the On-to-Knowledge Project to build an ontology-based tool suite that efficiently processes the many heterogeneous, distributed, and semistructured documents typically found in intranets and on the Web. The consortium´s approach integrates Semantic Web search technology, document exchange via transformation operators, automated information extraction, and systematic support for information maintenance and user-specific views. The paper considers how On-to-Knowledge´s tools exploit the power of ontologies to provide automated support for acquiring, maintaining, and accessing weakly structured information sources.