Ontology support for collaborative environments
The construction industry is an ever-increasing dynamic environment, where several short-term multi-partner projects are implemented with the aid of partners' unique skills and resources. For each project's successful implementation, shared knowledge, data and applications are necessary and towards this goal consistent knowledge management (KM) practices across projects and organisations are required. The e-COGNOS project focused on developing suitable infrastructures and tools for electronic KM within the construction domain in order to ensure a collaborative working environment. For this reason, semantics were employed for the analysis of documents that offered ontologies for the best possible document management with respect to content and interdependencies. More specifically, the e-COGNOS Ontology Server (e-COSer) is one of the key components of the developed architecture for the organisation of all ontology-related processes. As such the e-COSer provides ontological support to the KM core services involving ontology registration and processing of ontology related queries, as well as ontology maintenance. The e-COSer features interoperability with the system's core services, scalability and multilingual support. Furthermore, this web-based application can be easily integrated with knowledge management systems. The e-COSer is available as Open Source software and can be used for ontology management in DAML+OIL format. For more information click at: http://www.e-cognos.org
