Improving Document Accesibility through Ontology-Based Information Sharing

Information plays a crucial role in the entire life cycle of a product, i.e. from conceptual design through use and maintenance to eventual disposal. Once key personnel move on from a company, vital know-how may only exist in archived product documents, leading to great interest in ways of extracting readily sharable information from them. Studies have shown that knowledge workers spend appreciable amounts of their productive time searching for information online, and that those searches often prove unsuccessful. In addition, most engineers have difficulty in formulating effective query terms and current keyword-based searches are inefficient for helping them to select better queries. It is commonly argued that this problem can be solved by giving explicit definitions to the information through an ontology. Ontology-based information sharing has the potential to reduce the effort expended by engineers on retrieval and reuse of existing information. This paper presents an approach that extracts domain concepts from the documents based on an ontology definition. In particular, the applications of information extraction and document enrichment through engineers’ comments are discussed. The EDIT engineering ontology is described, and its role in improving document enrichment is presented.