KIWI: A Framework for Enabling Semantic Knowledge Management

Research on semantic-aware knowledge management provides new solutions, technologies, and methods to manage organizational knowledge. These solutions open new opportunities to “virtual challenges” as e-collaboration, e-business, e-learning and e-government. The research carried out for the KIWI (Knowledge-based Innovation for the Web Infrastructure) project is focused on the strategies for the current Web evolution in the more powerful Semantic Web, where formal semantic representation of resources enables a more effective knowledge sharing. The first pillar of the KIWI framework concerns development of ontologies as a metadata layer. Resources can be formally and semantically annotated with these metadata, while search engines or software agents can use them for retrieving the right information item or applying their reasoning capabilities. The second pillar of the KIWI framework is focused on the semantic search engine. Their capabilities and functionalities have to be improved in order to take advantage of the new semantic descriptions. A set of prototypal tools that enable knowledge experts to produce a semantic knowledge management system was delivered by the project. The KIWI framework and tools are applied in some projects for designing and developing knowledge-based platforms with positive results.