Knowledge Management |The Semantic Puzzle

1000-and-one pulldowns

May 12, 2009 by Thomas Thurner, Category: Internet & Media, Knowledge Management, Search Engines

: Image by wocrig via Flickr

Luckily, times have come, where semantic search techniques have found their way to enhance knowledge providing theme portals. Nearly once a week a new knowledge portal with built-in semantic search pops up. They deal with environmental issues, health care, economy etc. These sites are good examples how the vision of a knowledge web is fostered by semantic technologies. Such focused approaches are great showcases for “a” semantic web (even if they are not based on “the” RDF semantic web) in the next few months besides general knowledge portals like Wolfram Alpha.

But the potential of these semantic theme portals is often reduced essentially by their bad usability. You get lost in categories and flags – you get puzzled by pulldowns, mouseovers and embedded hierachies – it’s sometimes a mess out off 1001 functions. You need to understand the underpinning semantic concept to get oriented within these applications – and this is not the goal of the exercise. Search has to be easy.

To show the potential of semantic technologies, we need good examples, which offer good usability. This is a call to everyone to provide such examples.

See my favorites:

NextBio, a platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data
reegle, the Search Engine for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency
CultureSampo, a Finnish cultural heritage platform for institutional organizations as well as private citizens

loomp supports structured annotation in corporate settings

April 20, 2009 by Tassilo Pellegrini, Category: Corporate Semantic Web, Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge Management, Tools & Software

Markus Luczak-Rösch and his team from FU Berlin have published loomp, a WYSIWYG annotation tool especially designed for inhouse use. loomp is aiming at the Corporate Semantic Web market, providing a semantic application with low entry barriers and high usability designed for non-techies.

When asked about the concrete application area Markus says:

We have found various use cases especially in knowledge and content intense domains. The most interesting one is the journalists use case. Consider journalists which research and write articles and editors which revise and publish the work of journalists.

Journalists research specific topics on demand and access various information sources for this purpose, e.g. websites, books, related articles, and human informants. Only few journalists use digital devices for this task and even fewer apply information management systems. To transfer the finished article to the responsible editor at the publishing house the people use free text documents and email communication. Finally, an editor revises and releases the articles for his department. loomp can help journalists to manage their notes, interview logs, references, addresses, etc. loomp helps to link an article to its information sources.

Read the full interview here.

KiWi Annual Meeting

March 17, 2009 by Thomas Schandl, Category: Conferences & Events, Knowledge Management, Tools & Software

Last week the partners of the KiWi (Knowledge In a Wiki) project met in Salzburg for the 2009 Annual Meeting.

Sebastian Schaffert and his team demonstrated the latest version of this semantic based framework based on wiki principles and built on JBoss Seam.
You can take a look at the online showcase and download the one click installer of the pre-release.
Sebastian emphasised that KiWi will follow Linus Torvald’s maxim of releasing early and releasing often.
In June 2009 KiWi 1.0 should be ready, followed by 1.5 in December 2009, at which time Enabling Technologies and a first implementation of the uses cases will be included in the system.

After hearing talks about the KiWi User experience, data model and transaction management, we learned about the status of reasoning, querying, information extraction and personalisation of the Enabling Technologies groups (online slides forthcoming here).

Peter Reiser presented the Sun use case, in which the focus now is on realising an expert finder mechanism based on the “Community Equity” concept found in Sun Spaces (their highly popular, heavily customized version of Confluence).

Community Equity Diagram

In short Community Equity is a system for analysing the social activities in a community and measuring the value of the contributions to the community. Social activities are anything from creating content to simply viewing it. These activities are used to calculate the Community Equity (which is simply a number) of content, tags and people.
Consider this example for a content page: The more people view, download, reuse, comment on or rated the page positively, the higher the page’s Information Equity will be.
In turn the community members acquire Contribution Equity through the content items they create, i. e. the Information Equity of a content item “spills over” to its creator.
The same goes for Tag Equity: Each tag obtains the Equity from all the pages it is applied to. E.g. if there are 3 pages with the tag “JBoss” with Information equity of 10, 5 and 20, then the Tag Equity of JBoss is 35.
These things alone is very helpful for motivating people to contribute to the community and for judging the quality of content and ranking it accordingly.

On top of that, the Equity system allows for a expert finder system. People are related to all the tags that are used on the content items they created. Imagine a contributor has created several documents that were tagged with java and the sum of information equity of those pages is 550, then the person also has
That way a search for “Java” doesn’t only bring documents tagged with java, but also people with expertise in Java.
In KiWi this Community Equity system will be implemented and extended. For one, instead of flat tags KiWi will use concepts coming from SKOS thesauri, which will be managed using PoolParty.
These thesauri act as a shared knowledge model. In this way synonyms, parent/child concept relationships, etc. can be considered for Equity calculation, therby taking personalization, querying and expert finding to a whole new level.
Research will engage with questions like how should the Equity disperse through the graph: Imagine a community member with high Equity in “JBoss”. This means she probably has good expertise in Java too. As this subconcept relationship is expressed in the thesaurus, it is possible to transfer Equity from JBoss to Java, but one has to consider what percentage the equity will be transferred, if Equity only can only spread upwards from subconcept to parent concept or whether other kinds of relationships also warrant the transfer of some Equity.

Enterprise Search goes Open Source

February 19, 2009 by Thomas Thurner, Category: Corporate Semantic Web, Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge Management, Tools & Software

management_lenz_web In his recent interview Andreas Blumauer (SWC) asked Mario Lenz, from german-based knowledge management solution provider EMPOLIS, about their OS-Initative SMILA. As Lenz explained, SMILA acts within a domain of various approaches and already established solutions re. Enterprise Resource Planning Systems. So, he sees SMILA’s USP in: “a standardized way of representing, accessing and managing those unstructured data which not exist today. Rather, each vendor ships his own, proprietary solution. SMILA’s goals are to define and implement such a standard infrastructure framework and to establish a community bringing it forward.”

Besides an insight in many aspects of the initiative, the interview provides thoughts on how connected business-models, in providing services, could look like.

[read more]

	if not otherwise specified