Organisations are increasingly concerned
with knowledge management, and have acquired large intranets
(multimedia information Web sites) in order to capture their corporate
knowledge. This resource-base has typically been gradually collected
in an unsystematic fashion; furthermore the use
to which this information is put varies with the role
of each user within the organisation and the type and context of the
information that has been assembled. As the intranet grows in size and
complexity, it becomes impractical to build and use it in the present
ad hoc
and labour intensive fashion.
The Semantic Web is more than just
a repository of information; the meaning of the documents, knowledge about
their authors and the reasons for their publication are all used to infer contextually
appropriate associations, i.e. knowledge. The ability to publish new
material so that at some later date it can be appropriately reused should be
the goal of the IT strategy of any organisation with a suitably sophisticated
infrastructure.
By way of example, a manager writing a
policy statement is required to draw together information held in a number of
business documents: corporate vision statements, corporate strategy documents,
departmental policy documents, management summaries, financial reports, public
relations statements etc. While reading the content of those documents,
the manager will also want to know their purpose (e.g. the intended
audience) and authorship (e.g. the authors' position of influence) in
order to be confident about any inferences made from the documents. However,
managers do not often have sufficient time to digest the supplementary
documentation in order to evaluate its appropriateness. What they require is a
system that will offer relevant material from appropriate documents, based on
the context in which new material is being written. The new document should be
published in a form that facilitates reuse of the new knowledge embodied within
it, and which provides explicit references to the sources of any reused knowledge.
There exist
established and effective means of modelling relationships within a structured
hypermedia information space. Hypermedia design
methodologies address the relations between information
assets to provide site design and navigation features at the macro-structure
(document or Web page) level. We believe that by extending these design
methodologies to represent the relationships at a microstructure level, the
hypermedia design structure can be adapted to encode knowledge relationships,
and hence form the basis of the knowledge services described above.
This page
http://wick.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
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The WicK project is funded by the EPSRC
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MORE INFORMATION?
Email::
Les Carr, Project Manager
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 4479
Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
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OR POST TO:
WicK Project,
IAM Group,
Department of Electronics
& Computer Science,
University of Southampton,
Highfield,
Southampton
SO17 1BJ, UK
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