SIMS: An ontology-based multi-source knowledge management system

In the networked society, innovation projects are carried out through collaboration among wide communities of workers which interact via internet in order to gain knowledge from their collaborators. Moreover as a huge quantity of electronic information is already available on the web, workers look for knowledge items also in web information systems. Organizational web platforms have to support, therefore, cooperation through collaborative applications that integrate both knowledge publishing and sharing. In this paper a technological platform is presented. It enables a uniform and semantic based access to information items belonging to different information systems which are connected to the platform itself through specific modules, called wrappers. SIMS (Semantic Information Management System) is based both on collecting Dublin Core Medatada, which describes information items, structured in a JSR-170 compliant repository, and on the semi-automatic description of the same items based on domain ontologies, expressed in a formal language, such as OWL (Ontology Web Language). A SIMS component, called Semantic Content Navigator, allows users to navigate and access the entire knowledge base managed within the SIMS platform, using Semantic Web technologies. This work is part of the Italian research project DISCoRSO (Distributed Information Systems for CooRdinated Service Oriented interoperability).