Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management is a very broad area that, first of all, is a business philosophy to turn the tacit and explicit knowledge of employees into the corporate ability to solve problems and create new knowledge. Tacit knowledge is the knowledge and experience of the employees that is not documented but resides in the employee’s mind. Explicit knowledge is knowledge that is documented in writing or in electronic format (including video).

Explicit knowledge is mostly documented in a free-text format. Tools that make use of this free-text information are, for example, document management systems, intranets and portals, communities of practice, etc. L&C delivers technology that makes it possible to process this free-text information in an intelligent way to optimize the search and retrieval capabilities (by improving recall and precision as a result of semantic indexing technology), extract information and structure it for further processing including text mining, improve help desk workflows, create and manage company-wide terminology systems, etc.

Terminology / Ontology Management

Different people use different terminology to mean the same thing. While it is easy for humans to understand, it isn’t for computers. However, when employees are searching for information, they want the system to return all related articles without returning irrelevant ones, no matter what terminology used.

With current search and retrieval technologies (e.g. keywords, statistical systems) this is impossible since these technologies cannot cope with different terminologies used for the same concept. The solution is either to introduce a corporate-wide standard terminology that everyone has to use or to develop a system that can understand human language, i.e. an ontology: a conceptual representation of a specific domain.

In both cases you need the tools to build the terminology or ontology. For this L&C has developed a state-of-the-art terminology/ontology management system called LinKFactory. With this tool it is possible to create computer-understandable domain representations that consist of domain concepts that are linked together to represent the relationships they have. These concepts can then be linked to all possible terms that exist to name the concepts. This way, it doesn’t matter what terminology is used in documents in order to retrieve them when employees are searching the knowledge base for information on that specific subject.

The Semantic Web

The Worldwide Web holds a massive amount of information but lacks the intelligence to locate and share information in an effective and efficient way. To solve this problem, development toward a Semantic Web has started.

The Semantic Web is perceived as a "smart" worldwide web that has the ability to understand data and the relationship between pieces of information in human language and to distribute information, regardless of the format or language it is stored in.

The Semantic Web holds the promise to make all this information available by creating an infrastructure that makes interoperability of data, computer systems and applications a reality.

The core technology required to develop the Semantic Web lies in ontologies. Ontologies are conceptual representations of the world that make it possible for computers to understand human language.

Since L&C’s core business is in Natural Language Processing technology, we have developed great expertise in this area. We have developed a state-of-the-art tool - the LinKFactory® - to develop the complex, large scale, multi-lingual and formal ontologies needed for successful development toward a Semantic Web, and our TeSSI® engine contains middleware components for semantic indexing, search and retrieval and information extraction that can be integrated into the Semantic Web infrastructure to provide accurate information management regardless of the language or format in which the data is stored.

Contact us to see how we can help you improve the performance of your company within these areas.