Monitoring concepts from document collections
Effective knowledge management is now more crucial than ever to an organisation's success in the highly competitive world of business. Nowadays, companies must be able to deal with structured and unstructured information from a wide range of sources across both internal and external sites. The PARMENIDES project has come to the aid of the European business community by developing a unified framework which can support organisational knowledge management. Researchers created a systematic ontology-driven approach, which successfully integrated the entire procedure of information gathering, processing and analysis. The project team employed the PARMENIDES Concept Monitor module to examine the usage of application-specific concepts from a documents collection. This was carried out as the collection was amassed and altered over time. The module initially received a series of concepts collated by the RELFIN-Learner text mining suite from an appropriate document collection. The concepts used represented document fragments, which matched topics found within individual documents, rather than characterising the whole collection. The second set of input data involved a growing collection of documents, divided up into intervals of time. This information highlighted the popularity of different topics contained within and the level of correlation between them. The Concept Monitor included a range of criteria for identifying change together with an alert mechanism. The module also contained an Application programming interface (API) with the RELFIN-Learner for reading input concepts. The system developed by the PARMENIDES project allows knowledge workers to extract valuable information from both web-based and conventional sources. This can help in the development of online business intelligence for the life science sector. Extracted data and reports can also be studied for possible trends that can be utilised by the consumer food industry.
