Personal Ontologies for Knowledge Acquisition and Sharing in Collaborative PrOnto Framework

This paper summarizes our preliminary experiences with implementing some of the ideas lying behind the concept of creative environment. Research group at the National Institute of Telecommunications has developed a prototype framework for collaborative knowledge acquisition and sharing, called PrOnto. At the moment the artifacts we organize and share are typical sources of scientific knowledge, namely journal papers and web pages. In PrOnto we introduce two interrelated explicit levels of knowledge representation: keywords and ontological concepts. Each user of the framework maintains his own ontological profile, consisting of concepts and each concept is, in turn, by subjective user's decision, related to a set of weighted keywords that define its meaning. Furthermore, dedicated indexing engine is responsible for objectively establishing correspondence between documents and keywords, or in other words, the measure of representativeness of the keyword to document's content. Developing an appropriate knowledge model is a preliminary step to share it efficiently. We believe that higher level representation facilitates exploration of other people's areas of interest. PrOnto gives an opportunity to browse knowledge artifacts from the conceptual point of view of any user registered in the system. The paper presents the ideas behind the PrOnto framework, gives an outline of its components and finalizes with a number of conclusions and proposals for futuren enhancements.