Ontology-based Knowledge Management for SMEs

The OnToBau research project' aims to provide a way to classify, archive and effectively use their knowledge with the assistance of an ontology-based knowledge archive for small and medium companies from construction industry. This archive is intended to pro-actively provide users with information to assist them in their daily business process handling. In this paper we describe the architecture of the OnToBau system. The system has four main parts. The preprocessing modules prepare the resources that should be stored in the knowledge archive for the enclosed inference system. The inference system is the core component and extracts the information from the preprocessed resources. Ontologies provide the necessary domain knowledge. In order to exploit the available knowledge, a personal agent monitors the current activities of the user and tries to infer the intention from his behaviors. At certain points it automatically offers the user helpful information. Again ontologies are used to represent information about the business processes. In addition, the user has the option to search for information in the archive through the graphical user interface. In this paper we focus on the description of the first main part of the architecture: to easily add knowledge to the knowledge base and to allow a general processing of different resources within a company (E-Mails, calendar entries, papers etc.), an XML-based representation language was developed, namely the OnToBau representation language (ORL). Converters are used to transform the resources into ORL.