Customising knowledge search in collaborative networked organisations through context-based query expansion

Abstract

Searching for knowledge in collaborative networked organisations (CNOs) is an important issue as partners must share and use the available knowledge and information spread over their members in the network. Besides that, partners of such networks work in several contexts (roles, activities, processes) and they have naturally different interests. Based on these observations, the aim of this work is to characterise the user context in a CNO and use such a context for customising knowledge search in CNOs. The basic assumption is that the relevance of the search results in the CNO domain is not only defined by the terms of the query but also by the context of the user performing the search. This paper presents an ontology-based model for CNO context as well as a set of rules for query customisation and these elements are framed in an existing framework for knowledge search. Finally, a prototype implementation of the model and rules is presented and some experiments are discussed.

Keywords:

• collaborative networked organisations
• knowledge search
• context models
• context-based search
• query expansion

Acknowledgements

This work has been partially supported by the Brazilian council of research and scientific development–CNPq. It was developed in the scope of the Brazilian IFM project (www.ifm.org.br) and the European IST FP-6 IP ECOLEAD project (www.ecolead.org). Special thanks also to Mr Wassim Bouaziz for his help on the initial version of the model and rules, and to Mr Leandro Loss and Mr Fabiano Baldo for their valuable comments on the paper.

Notes

Notes

1. ‘Information’ is defined as the result of manipulation and organisation processes based on data gathered in a given context. ‘Knowledge’ is defined as a complete set of information and its relations that lead people to take decisions and to create new knowledge (Huber 1991).

2. www.oasis-open.org/committees/ubl, www.rosettanet.org.

3. Resource Description Framework is part of the W3C standards for the development of the semantic Web. RDF is particularly intended for representing metadata about Web resources. It also provides the basis for richer languages used to represent ontologies, like DAML+OIL and OWL (Manola and Miller 2004).

4. Portlets are web applications that can be deployed in a portal and customised according to the individual preferences of users. The portlets developed in this work follow the JSR-168 recommendation (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168).

5. http://www.jessrules.com/

6. Extensible stylesheet language.