Customising knowledge search in collaborative networked organisations through context-based query expansion

Searching for knowledge in collaborative networked organisations (CNOs) is an important issue as partners must share and use the available knowledge and information spread over their members in the network. Besides that, partners of such networks work in several contexts (roles, activities, processes) and they have naturally different interests. Based on these observations, the aim of this work is to characterise the user context in a CNO and use such a context for customising knowledge search in CNOs. The basic assumption is that the relevance of the search results in the CNO domain is not only defined by the terms of the query but also by the context of the user performing the search. This paper presents an ontology-based model for CNO context as well as a set of rules for query customisation and these elements are framed in an existing framework for knowledge search. Finally, a prototype implementation of the model and rules is presented and some experiments are discussed.