Semantic Meta-Data Enhancement and Ontologies: The Next Frontier in Knowledge Management and Portal Integration

Dale Tuttle Project Performance Corporation 1760 Old Meadow Road, 4th Floor McLean, Virginia 22102 703-748-7000

Business Drivers
Businesses that use the portal technologies possess scaleable, flexible, and customizable web-based architectures to create single integration points for enterprise applications and content. For content delivery, most portals ship with powerful search engines and the ability to build hierarchial taxonomies to house internal and external document repositories. Many portal customers are finding taxonomy construction processes to be difficult to manage and are finding it even more difficult to build consensus when trying to implement an enterprise taxonomy. Furthermore, even in those cases where a taxonomy has been implemented, users frequently complain that documents are not where they should be in the directory structure. Many vendors are now offering semantic enhancement tools that leverage an ontology rather than a taxonomy as a classification schema. Ontologies are descriptions of concepts and relationships between various objects. For example, content may be divided into concepts such as country or financial status. Those two concepts could have complex relationships between them and other concepts found in the ontology. New semantic enhancement tools index content and map them to entities within the specified ontology. This approach is quickly gaining favor both in and outside of the portal space for a variety of reasons. First, people think about content based on concepts embedded in a document (what the document is about) and not necessarily about how someone would find the content if they were browsing to it via a hierarchical taxonomy. By capturing the concepts within a document, people can then browse for a document for what they think it is about, rather than where it might reside in a directory. Secondly, if documents are organized

2004 Project Performance Corporation

based on concepts, they can then be related to each other based on those concepts. This second area is perhaps the most interesting, in that it enables documents to be related to a user-profile and precisely delivered to specific user-interests. Many semantic engines that use an ontological approach enhance a documents metadata with concepts found in the ontology. They then look for relationships between entities and add related concepts to the documents meta-data. In this way, a document can have multiple concepts associated with it that a reader may not even be aware of. For example, if a document is mentions debt-forgiveness in the developing world, it could also be related to debt crises, current-account deficits, and currency devaluation. A semantic engine would know that these concepts are related, and add them to the meta-data of the documenteven if the document did not explicitly mention those words. In short, semantically enhanced documents, residing in an Ontology, better reflect how users actually associate documents with one another and are quickly gaining favor over conventional meta-data and taxonomic approaches.

Leveraging Semantic Metadata

Semantically enhanced meta-data enables portal content retrieval to be taken to a new level of precision. Not only can users find documents by browing concepts in an ontology, the portal can use the enhanced meta-data to inform a user of documents relating to their profile. For example, a personalization portlet could be employed to enable users to identify a series of topical or domain areas of interest. These selections, which could be changed at any time, could form the basis for content delivery to that individual user. Because concepts have been embedded into the portals content, every document that relates to a topic of interest to the user can be retrieved by way of a query to the semantic engine. In this way, documents can now be delivered based on topics of interest that relate to user interests. By allowing users to set up customized profiles, each topic of interest will show documents semantically related to that topic and the users profile. Moreover, users can browse the collections ontology to discover relationships between documents that are not normally evident when content resides in a standard taxonomy. Not only can documents be delivered to a user based on a customized profile, the documents themselves can now expose complex relationships with one another. For example, every document of interest to a user can identify what other documents are related to itboth within a topic area and across multiple document repositories.

2004 Project Performance Corporation

This combination of user profiling and semantically enhanced documents dramatically extends the power of the portal beyond what most portals offersout-of-the box. In effect, these tools allow every user to explore documents based on their interest without browsing complex taxonomies. When combined with profiling, each user can change what information they want to see with a simple change of their profile in the portlet.

Benefits
Semantic engines and ontological approaches to content management offer the following benefits to most portal users: Semantically enhanced content enables users to find information more rapidly; Content can now be related to semantic relationships, making it easier to deploy content to specific user-groups; The user-experience can revolve around topics of information with related content from across an enterprise ontology displayed within each topic; Users can discover related content based on semantic relationships not evident in titles, keywords, and simple document abstracts; Users can instantly see how documents relate to one another. For example, if you have a topic in your portal about sales forecasts in the Northeast, all documents that semantically relate to that topic will be displayed. Moreover, each individual document will display other documents that relate to it.

Portal technologies are rapidly developing. It is clear that knowledge management, content management, and precise delivery of content is becoming more and more important. It is also clear that semantic enhancement engines and ontological approaches to content categorization could dramatically transform the portal experience.

2004 Project Performance Corporation