Towards the Semantic Web: Ontology-driven Knowledge Management

With the current changes driven by the expansion of the World Wide Web, this book uses a different approach from other books on the market: it applies ontologies to electronically available information to improve the quality of knowledge management in large and distributed organizations. Ontologies are formal theories supporting knowledge sharing and reuse. They can be used to explicitly represent semantics of semi--structured information. These enable sophisticated automatic support for acquiring, maintaining and accessing information. Methodology and tools are developed for intelligent access to large volumes of semi--structured and textual information sources in intra-- and extra--, and internet--based environments to employ the full power of ontologies in supporting knowledge management from the information client perspective and the information provider. The aim of the book is to support efficient and effective knowledge management and focuses on weakly-- structured online information sources. It is ...