Building up and making use of corporate knowledge repositories

Abstract

In this paper, we present a methodology (and some concrete experiments) for the construction and use of corporate knowledge repositories. They can be defined as on-line, computer-based storehouses of expertise, knowledge, experience and documentation about particular aspects of a corporation. We consider here only the ‘textual component’ of corporate knowledge — i.e., all sorts of economically valuable, natural language documents like news stories, telex reports, internal documentation (memos, policy statements, reports and minutes), normative texts, intelligence messages, etc. In this case, the construction of effectively usable corporate knowledge repositories can be achieved with the translation of the original documents into some type of conceptual format. The ‘metadocuments’ obtained in this way can then be stored into a knowledge repository and, given their role of advanced document models, all the traditional functions of information retrieval, e.g., searching, retrieving and producing an answer (and other functions like intelligent navigation inside the repository) can be performed directly on them.