Integrating descriptions of knowledge management learning activities into large ontological structures:: A case study

Ontologies have been recognized as a fundamental infrastructure for advanced approaches to Knowledge Management (KM) automation, and the conceptual foundations for them have been discussed in some previous reports. Nonetheless, such conceptual structures should be properly integrated into existing ontological bases, for the practical purpose of providing the required support for the development of intelligent applications. Such applications should ideally integrate KM concepts into a framework of common-sense knowledge with clear computational semantics. In this paper, such an integration work is illustrated through a concrete case study, using the large OpenCyc knowledge base. Concretely, the main elements of the Holsapple and Joshi KM ontology and some existing work on e-learning ontologies are explicitly linked to OpenCyc definitions, providing a framework for the development of functionalities that use the built-in reasoning services of OpenCyc in KM activities. The integration can be used as the point of departure for the engineering of KM-oriented systems that account for a shared understanding of the discipline and rely on public semantics provided by one of the largest open knowledge bases available. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.