Ontology-driven knowledge management
The expansion of e-commerce has brought new needs in the content management activities of businesses. This is due to the fact that required information may come from either internal or external sources to the company. Moreover, modern analytical software has become more proactive in driving business processes on the basis of analysis results. Thereby, customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software tools contain structured information that can be easily organised. Yet, there is a lot of unstructured data coming from various locations and in several formats that cannot be organised easily and hence utilised. The need to access, manage and analyse all knowledge sources is imperative for any organisation wishing to have the competitive advantage using its information treasure effectively. Urged by this, the PARMENIDES project focused on providing an effective organisational knowledge management system for contemporary business organisations. By realising an ontology driven mechanism, the entire process of gathering, processing and analysing of information is integrated. The management of information concerns both structured and unstructured heterogeneous data sources. Part of the project work involved an ontology editor allowing users to build and store ontologies in a tree-based graphical interface with drag-and-drop options. The tool is capable of managing, importing and exporting multiple ontologies along with user-friendly reporting on their structure. Current ontologies can also be treated equally as single XML documents. Licence agreements for the ontology editor tool are available. For more information on the project click at: http://www.crim.co.umist.ac.uk/parmenides/
