</owl:Class>
<owl:Class rdf:ID="DeskTopPublishing">
<rdfs:subClassOf rdf:resource="#Publishing"/>
<rdfs:subClassOf rdf:resource="#DocumentProcessing"/>
</owl:Class>
Individual employees within Swiss Life were asked to create “home pages”
based on form filling that was driven by the skills-ontology. The correspond- ing collection of instances could be queried using a form-based interface that generated RQL queries (see chapter 3).
Although the system never left the prototype stage, it was in use by ini- tially 100 (later 150) people in selected departments at Swiss Life headquar- ters.
6.5 Think Tank Portal at EnerSearch
6.5.1 The Setting
EnerSearch is an industrial research consortium focused on information tech- nology in energy. Its aim is to create and disseminate knowledge on how the use of advanced IT will impact on the energy utility sector, particularly in view of the liberalization of this sector across Europe.
EnerSearch has a structure that is very different from a traditional research company. Research projects are carried out by a varied and changing group of researchers spread over different countries (Sweden, United States, the Netherlands, Germany, France). Many of them, although funded for their work, are not employees of EnerSearch. Thus, EnerSearch is organized as a virtual organization. The insights derived from the conducted research are intended for interested utility industries and IT suppliers. Here, EnerSearch has the structure of a limited company, which is owned by a number of firms in the industry sector that have an express interest in the research be- ing carried out. Shareholding companies include large utility companies in different European countries, including Sweden (Sydkraft), Portugal (EDP), the Netherlands (ENECO), Spain (Iberdrola) and Germany (Eon), as well as some worldwide IT suppliers to this sector (IBM, ABB). Because of this wide geographical spread, EnerSearch also has the character of a virtual organiza- tion from a knowledge distribution point of view.
6.5.2 The Problem
Dissemination of knowledge is a key function of EnerSearch. The EnerSearch web site is an important mechanism for knowledge dissemination. (In fact, one of the shareholding companies actually entered EnerSearch directly as a result of getting to know the web site). Nevertheless, the information struc- ture of the web site leaves much to be desired. Its main organization is in terms of “about us” information: what projects have been done, which re- searchers are involved, papers, reports and presentations. Consequently, it does not satisfy the needs of information seekers. They are generally not in- terested in knowing what the projects are, or who the authors are, but rather in finding answers to questions that are important in this industry domain, such as: does load management lead to cost-saving? If so, how big are they, and what are the required upfront investments? Can powerline communica- tion be technically competitive to ADSL or cable modems?
6.5.3 The Contribution of Semantic Web Technology
The EnerSearch web-site is in fact used by different target groups: re- searchers in the field, staff and management of utility industries, and so on.
It is quite possible to form a clear picture of what kind of topics and questions would be relevant for these target groups. Finally, the knowledge domain in which EnerSearch works is relatively well defined. As a result of these fac- tors, it is possible to define a domain ontology that is sufficiently stable and of good enough quality. In fact, the On-To-Knowledge project ran successful experiments using a lightweight “EnerSearch lunchtime ontology” that took developers no more than a few hours to develop (over lunchtime).
This lightweight ontology consisted only of a taxonomical hierarchy (and therefore only needed RDF Schema expressivity). The following is a snap- shot of one of the branches of this ontology in informal notation:
...
IT
Hardware Software Applications Communication
Powerline Agent
Electronic Commerce Agents
6.5 Think Tank Portal at EnerSearch 189
Figure 6.2 Semantic map of part of the EnerSearch Web site
Multi-agent systems Intelligent agents Market/auction Resource allocation Algorithms
This ontology was used in a number of different ways to drive naviga- tion tools on the EnerSearch web site. Figure 6.2 shows a semantic map of the EnerSearch web site for the subtopics of the concept “agent” and figure 6.3 shows the semantic distance between different authors, in terms of their disciplinary fields of research and publication.5
Figure 6.4 shows how some of the same information is displayed to the user in an entirely different manner with the Spectacle Server semantic
5. Both figures display results obtained by using semantic clustering visualization software from Aduna, <http://www.aduna.biz>.
Figure 6.3 Semantic distance between EnerSearch authors
browsing software.6 The user selected the “By Author” option, then chose the author Fredrik Ygge and the concept “cable length”. The result lists all the pages with publication on this topic by Fredrik Ygge.
A third way of displaying the information was created by the QuizRDF tool7. Rather then choosing between either an entirely ontology based dis- play (as in the three displayed figures), or a traditional keyword based search without any semantic grounding, QuizRDF aims to combine both: the user can type in general keywords. This will result in a traditional list of papers containing these keywords. However, it also displays those concepts in the hierarchy which describe these papers, allowing the user to embark on an ontology-driven search starting from the hits that resulted from a keyword- based search.
In this application scenario we have seen how a traditional information source can be disclosed in a number of innovative ways. All these disclosure mechanisms (textual and graphic, searching or browsing) are based on a sin- gle underlying lightweight ontology but cater for a broad spectrum of users with different needs and backgrounds.
6. From Aduna, <http://www.aduna.biz>.
7. Prototyped by British Telecom Research Labs.