Concept Indexes: Sharing Knowledge from Documents

Abstract

In today’s electronic environments, knowledge is often captured through collections of documents in email or news archives, bookmark lists, document servers, and shared workspaces. Insights drawn from the documents are seldom made explicit, although persons who work in teams, form a group, or belong to a community would greatly profit from sharing their knowledge. To improve this situation, the efforts to identify knowledge in the documents and, later, to quickly find a suitable piece of knowledge must be decreased, while the benefits of reusing the knowledge must be increased. Knowledge is a subject of many disciplines and has been given many definitions. Essentially, knowledge helps an actor (a person, agent or expert system) to perform a task, attain a goal or solve a problem. Knowledge management is concerned with capturing and identifying knowledge, organising it, and distributing and accessing the knowledge. Knowledge can be passed through observation, communication and documents.