An approach to KNOW-WHO using RDF
Kunio Matsui
Know-Who (looking for experts with the specific skill, for instance) is one
of the functions to realize Knowledge Management(KM). Among various KM
functions, Know-Who is
difficult to implement, because it requires managing tacit knowledge in
people as well as explicit knowledge in DBs, documents, and so on. The
central problem is how to collect and represent tacit knowledge.
There are already some products with Know-Who function. In most
products, however, personal skill information is manually declared as a set
of
attribute-value pair, and stored in RDBs. This method has the following two
problems.
1. It requires high maintenance costs. As personal knowledge is changing
day by day, the database must be updated continually. However, skilled
people are always busy, and have no extra time for maintenance.
2. A more complex data structure is required to represent personal
knowledge. Simple attribute-value pair structure is not enough to do
that.
My talk is about our approach, called ¡ÈWorkWare++¡É to
solve above problems in Know-Who. Using NLP techniques, WorkWare++
attaches semantic links between objects in the groupware such as documents,
people, meetings, and so on, semi-automatically. Those links are stored as
RDF (Resource Description Framework) that is the standard metadata
format in the Semantic Web. Our Know-Who function is implemented as a
combination of full-text searching and information visualization of the RDF
data.