Knowledge usage tools
Efficient knowledge repositories are built from ontologies that need to be small and focused in order to capture and model a particular knowledge domain. Yet, users are often required to access different knowledge domains and thus, use other ontologies as well. In those cases, due to varying terminology and/or different conception, conflicts and overlapping of ontology semantics can occur. To address this issue, the Ontology Reconciliation Agent allows the creation of mappings and semantic bridges between the various ontologies. This speeds up the conflict reconciliation process providing domain experts and knowledge engineers with the optimal mapping scheme in very short time. The Conflict Detection Agent is a set of collaborating agents that are capable of tackling complex ontology design issues. This distributed system provides users with increased potentialities of collaboration during the ontology design, maintenance and evolution stages. During the graphical modification of the domain ontology, proposed changes are visually exemplified and the collaboration process is completely transparent. This intelligent, knowledge-oriented collaboration tool also allows the concurrent participation in multiple collaborations over various domain ontologies. The Knowledge Distribution Agent is an application tool offering effective propagation of changes across domain members. These changes take place at the corporate level and involve addition of documents to the corporate repository, information updates in specific instances and data deletion. Composed of different types of agents with different roles, this highly distributed multi-agent system implements knowledge propagation within the organisation. By using dynamic knowledge filters that are user-defined in terms of interest, this tool hinders information flooding of system users. Most of the currently available knowledge management systems need to be customised according to the special needs of each corporation or organisation. Specialised in intelligent agents technology, the project participant Archetypon S.A. addressed this issue and developed these knowledge usage tools for user-modelling and intelligent category extraction. These tools are expected to allow the user to dynamically optimise the corporate ontology in accordance to the evolution of the organisation's knowledge. For further information, click at the project site: http://www.ontologging.com
