| Introduction
Knowledge
is a decisive competitive-advantage for today's corporations. Knowledge of schedules,
raw materials, labor, manufacturing and distribution is essential to the supply
chain while knowledge of customer interests and buying habits, latest technologies,
budget constraints, marketing plans are crucial to product development. It offers
a powerful tool for gaining market share and preserving a competitive edge, but
it is costly to capture and control. Methodologies and technologies that assist
in the acquisition, maintenance, and distribution of knowledge are essential to
an organization's success. Today's society, and the world in general, have contributed
to this growth in importance of knowledge management and knowledge based systems.
Some examples include (www.worldedreform.com/intercon2/f15a.pdf): *
Accelerating rate of change in every aspect of technology
and society
* Staff migration and attrition (downsizing
and reengineering)
*
Geographic dispersion associated with globalization of markets
*
Global integration of cultures, companies and markets
*
Increase in networked organizations
* Increased
level of education and training of the population
*
Growing knowledge-intensity of goods and services
*
Revolution in information technology It is not easy to efficiently
and cost-effectively identify, acquire and maintain this knowledge. At a minimum,
organizations must be able to:
* agree to an
organization-wide vocabulary to ensure knowledge
is consistently communicated and understood;
*
identify, explicitly represent and model this knowledge;
| | *
share and reuse this knowledge across independent applications
and domains. This article looks at these
aspects of knowledge acquisition by examining Protégé (http://Protégé.stanford.edu),
a free open-source Java tool with an extensible architecture for creating customized
knowledge-based applications - based on Ontologies (www.ontology.org).
It also reviews the concept of Ontologies (see side bar), and associated support
methodologies, which establish the vocabulary and model the concepts along with
their inter-relationships. This concept also includes processing of the associated
attributes for a particular field of knowledge. By reviewing the evolution of
Protégé, an ontology modeling and knowledge acquisition environment
(developed by Stanford Medical Informatics (http://camis.stanford.edu)
at the Stanford University School of Medicine), an understanding of fundamental
concepts that underpin knowledge acquisition emerges. This environment creates
and modifies the ontologies and knowledge bases it generates to enable developers
and domain experts to build knowledge-based systems.
Other
associated technologies and standards mentioned in this article include the Open
Knowledge Base Connectivity (OKBC), Generic Frame Protocol (GFP), Resource Description
Framework (RDF), OWL and OWL-S. The Evolution of Protégé
Opal
(http://smi-web.stanford.edu/
pubs/SMI_Abstracts/SMI-86-0137.html) was an expert system shell-based
application developed as part of the medical domain Oncocin (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/context/1419258/0).
Oncocin developed this knowledge acquisition and advice system for protocol-based
cancer therapy. Opal enabled patient history entry by the physician or nurse (the
domain experts) |
