Building and searching an XML-based corporate memory

Abstract

NO MATTER WHO USES A CORporate memory or how it is constructed, information search through that memory should be efficient and effective. In particular, it should adapt to the users' needs, activities, and work environments. For a document-based corporate memory distributed through the Web, which is our research area, these requirements raise two main questions: How will we describe the documents that will be part of this corporate memory? How can we improve their retrieval on the Web, particularly by taking advantage of knowledge models? To answer these questions, we've developed a strategy that applies the XML (Extensible Markup Language) metalanguage to knowledge management for an enterprise. (In this case, an enterprise is an actual company or a virtual enterprise made of distributed organizations and teams of people who work together online.) We've implemented this strategy in the Osirix (ontology-guided search for information retrieval in XML documents) system. Because Osirix performs search based on the semantics of the documents, it can find more relevant documents than classic search engines can. XML & knowledge management HTML would seem the natural choice for Web documents because it is the most popular language for them. However, because of HTML's drawbacks (see the sidebar "From HTML to XML"), we prefer XML for a document-and Web-based corporate memory. XML, which derives from SGML, defines a standard for document formation. A DTD (document type definition) is a syntactic specification used as a model for XML documents. It contains definitions of the elements and their attached attributes. A document is considered valid if it conforms to its associated DTD. XML offers major advantages for corporate-memory management, combining the benefits of SGML and the Web: An information-exchange standard. To facilitate communication and exchange of information or knowledge, a community (that is, a department, an enterprise, a group of companies of the same domain, a company and its related providers and clients, and so on) can use a DTD to define a standard domain-oriented or application-oriented vocabulary. Community members can then express documents or data with the defined XML markups and exchange them using these markups. An enterprise can thus define one or several DTDs for the documents that will constitute its corporate memory.

Managing corporate memory on the semantic web

“…The concept of corporate memory has been defined by several researchers in different ways but one that is widely referenced and appropriate for this research is (Rabarijaona, Dieng et al 2000):…”

“…Rabarijaona et al presented advantages of XML meta-language and ontology for corporate knowledge management (Rabarijaona, Dieng et al 2000). In (Huang, Tseng et al 2005), XML is implemented to design the structure of knowledge and construct a standard corporate memory according to the characteristics of different data-analysis techniques.…”

A Decision Support System Based on Artificial Neural Networks for Pulmonary Tuberculosis Diagnosis

“…The data representation format is an important aspect that was considered to efficiently manage the whole information. Markup languages, as XML, can be used to describe knowledge structures and to support institutional memory development (Rabarijaona, 2000, Cook, 2000. XML may provide a standard structure to communicate and interchange data and knowledge among diverse systems.…”

Using Topic Maps in an E-learning Context

“…In this sense, a course is an organization. A common approach to tackle the knowledge management problem in an organization consists in designing an organizational memory [2]. In order to share information in an organization, actors have to use a common terminology, especially when they are geographically distant.…”