An Approach for Indexation, Classification and Retrieval of Knowledge Sources in Collaborative Environments

This work introduces a conceptual framework and its current implementation to support the semantic enrichment of knowledge sources. It improves the ability for indexing and searching of knowledge sources, enabled by a reference ontology and a set of services which implement the searching and indexing capabilities. Essentially, our approach defines an appropriate knowledge representation based on semantic vectors which are created using three different but complementary algorithms for each knowledge source, using respectively the concepts and their equivalent terms, the taxonomical relations, and ontological relations. We introduce the conceptual framework, its technical architecture (and respective implementation) supporting a modular set of semantic services based on individual collaboration in a project-based environment (for Building & Construction sector). The main elements defined by the architecture are an ontology (to encapsulate human knowledge), a set of web services to support the management of the ontology and adequate handling of knowledge providing search/indexing capabilities (through statistical/semantically calculus). This paper also provides some examples detailing the indexation process of knowledge sources, adopting two distinct algorithms: “Lexical Entries-based” and “Taxonomy-based”. Results achieved so far and future goals pursued here are also presented.