A Knowledge Sharing Framework Based on Topic Maps Compliant Web Glossaries

摘要

With our interests focused on semantic web-based document management, the organization of management notes and the applications of Topic Maps, our goal is to construct an ontology-driven framework for knowledge management applications. Considering the human interpretation of semantically encoded information with standard knowledge representation technologies, the Topic Maps data model seems to offer a psychologically plausible means of capturing and revealing shared knowledge. Certain knowledge management technologies (RDF, OWL etc.) are optimized for inferencing and handling machine-readable information, regardless of whether humans are able to interpret it easily. The strength of Topic Maps lies in its focus on the human construal of concepts. As a result, formal logic loses ground in our applications, but several of the technology's features target the readable presentation of knowledge. (For instance, Subject Identifiers imply human-readable sources, topics can have multiple names, the scope of expressions can be limited by the "Scope" attribute etc.) We suggest a Topic Maps compliant web glossary that will serve as a transparent knowledge layer above the enterprise applications, with the goal of making its use more natural to the human user than today's other widespread ontology-based applications.