Designing an Intelligent, User-Friendly Knowledge Sharing Platform with Semantic Web Technologies
Michael Engler, FH Furtwangen · 2005
Often knowledge management systems tend to fail because they lack a tight integration into work tasks and do not consider the organizational and cultural context of their users. This shows that a design for a knowledge management system needs to take into account the goals and motivations of its users. Employing usability engineering, a human-centered approach for designing software applications, allows to sensibly regard the organizational and cultural context during the design of a knowledge management application. Sir Tim Berners-Lee vision of the Semantic Web provides an environment to publish information with well-defined meaning. Ontologies are seen as a key enabler for this Semantic Web because they allow the publication of well defined information in a formal way. The information stored in an ontology can be turned into knowledge when used in a new context. It is believed that ontologies are able to store and retrieve knowledge better than other approaches because they allow the formal semantic annotation of data. An important task for designing and using an ontology-based knowledge management system is to create and evolve an ontology. This task can be achieved with ontology engineering processes such as DILIGENT. In this work two use cases are researched, which are defined for the digital library case study of the SEKT project carried out at BT. The use case “search & browse” explores an interaction design for a digital library, which uses ontologies to enhance the searching and browsing for resources. The second use case “Jottings” suggests an interaction design for a knowledge sharing application, which provides an advanced bookmark function, describing bookmarks by assigning well-defined topics. This function is used to research how users with normal IT skills can extend an ontology by interacting with a software application. The understanding how users extend ontologies is guided by the ontology engineering process DILIGENT. 1from the English word “to jot” meaning making a short note Acknowledgments Special thanks to Ian Thurlow and Nick Kings, who were always willing to help and have also done the proof reading for this work. Thanks to David Alsmeyer, John Davies, Paul Warren, Alistair Duke, Sandra Stincic, from BT and all others of the Next Generation Web Research Lab at BT, who have helped and made my stay in Ipswich very pleasant. Thanks to Chirstoph Tempich for supervising the work and many important discussions, York Sure, and others from the Institute AIFB, who have made this work possible. Also thanks to Christopher Adl, Kai Broszat, Diana Cheng, Evgeni Kravets, Fay Owston, Otmar Seckinger, and Bernhard Seckinger. Finally thanks to Prof. Walter for suggesting to research the topic Semantic Web and supervising this work as well as Prof. Dr. Eisenbiegler for supervising this thesis. Research reported in this thesis has been financed by EU in the IST project SEKT (IST-2003-506826). Contacts of partners: York Sure John Davies Institute AIFB BT Exact University of Karlyruhe Orion 5/12, Adastral Park Englerstrase 11 Ipswich IP5 3RE D-76131 Karlsruhe UK Germany Eidesstattliche Erklarung Ich erklare hiermit an Eides statt, dass ich die vorliegende Diplomarbeit selbstandig und ohne unzulassige fremde Hilfe angefertigt habe. Alle verwendeten Quellen und Hilfsmittel sind angegeben. Rheinbach, den 25.2.2005