On-To-Knowledge: Content-driven Knowledge-Management through Evolving Ontologies

The Information Society builds on the convergence of information, communication and networking technologies and takes advantage of infrastructures like the Internet and the Web. The aim of the IST-Programme is to help to create a user friendly information society. Currently there is a large gap between the information needs of a user and the way information is made available online.
Within the On-To-Knowledge-Project we will develop tools and methods for supporting knowledge management relying on sharable and reusable knowledge ontologies. The technical backbone of On-To-Knowledge is the use of ontologies for the various tasks of information integration and mediation.
The application focus of On-To-Knowledge is the knowledge management in large and distributed organisations. This aspect of On-To-Knowledge is emphasised by three case studies in the areas of Organisational Memory of a large company, help desk functionality of a call centre, and the knowledge management in a virtual enterprise.
Efficient knowledge management has been identified as key to maintaining the competiveness of organisations. Ontologies have been developed in the knowledge engineering discipline as a means to share and reuse knowledge. The On-To-Knowledge project will develop methods and tools and employ the full power of the ontological approach to facilitate knowledge management. The On-To-Knowledge tools will help knowledge workers who are not IT specialists to access company-wide information repositories in an effcient, natural and intuitive way.