Knowledge Management Research Group @ La Salle

]project-open[ Knowledge Management is a research project at the La Salle University in Barcelona, Spain. The research group consists of four final thesis students and three senior researchers. Within the group we are basicly working on two scenarios:

• The "Expert Finder" scenario:
  An employee in a large multinational corporation is looking for an expert in a specific field.
• The "Consulting Company" scenario:
  A small-medium sized consulting company wants to retain knowledge that would be lost due to high fluctuation of junior consultants.

Common to both scenarios is the use of the OpenACS community system and the ]project-open[ project management system.

Are you interested? Please contact us if need more information of if you would like to participate in these projects.

Expert Finder Scenario

The Expert Finder module allows to identify the people related to a specific subject by taking advantage of ownership information about documents and Intranet contents.

Once a list of potential experts is found, the system allows the user to post a question, initiating further discussion using discussion forums and/or chat, tracking expert responses and allowing both parties to rate the other side.

This project involves the classification of keywords, persons, documents and workgroups into an ontology, in order to restrict the search space and to desambiguate "names". Name disambiguation is especially important, because names can refer to many persons, but it is vast majority of the information we've got.

We use the probabilistic calculus as base for our system, with ontology classification represented as a vector of probabilities, one probability for each node. This representation is very database-friendly, even though the size of the ontology gets somewhat limited.

We've got a lot of experience with description logics and frame-based symbolic systems, but we are going now for the probabilistic calculus, because it is closer to the scoring algorithms used in Internet search engines while providing sound semantics.

Consulting Company Scenario

For the "consulting company scenario" we develop and integrate several modules to formalize the execution of consulting projects. This formalization consists in a number of milestones and documents that need to be generated.

The solution provides: Integrated Web document management (project rooms) A sophisticated search engine, allowing to search though all content related to Project, Customer and User including names, descriptions and files in related filestorage.

Features include: Restriction of search results according to user permissions: A fine-grain permission model allows to restrict access pemissions according to projects/customers, project phases etc.

Restriction of search results according to a corporate domain model: Classification is performed using Bayesian Network (AI) classifiers that are trained by tagging a subset of files Presentation of search result eliminating duplicates and showing similar documents (copy-past-modified versions of an original document) as such.

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