Evolution of the metadata in the ontology-based knowledge management systems

Abstract

An ontology-based knowledge management system uses an ontology to represent explicit specification of a business domain and to serve as a backbone for providing and searching for knowledge sources. But, dynamically changing business environment implies changes in the conceptualisation of a business domain that are reflected on the underlying domain ontologies. Consequently, these changes have effects on the performances and validity of the KM system. In this paper we present an approach for enabling consistency of the description of knowledge sources in an ontology-based KM system in the case of changes in the domain ontology. This approach is based on our research in the ontology evolution and ontology-based annotation of documents. The proposed method is implemented in our semantic annotation framework so that effcient acquiring and maintaining of ontology-based metadata is supported.