Knowledge management

Exposing content with semantic classification

Getting taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies off the shelf and in use to add semantic capabilities to any application is a goal of the Semaphore design. However, the value of the underlying model should not be understated. With the flexibility of the Ontology Manager tool more than just term names can be captured: a Semaphore model can truly model and encapsulate explicit knowledge in a domain.

Knowledge Management teams use Semaphore because of its flexibility

The Ontology Manager is not limited to the basic relationship types defined by the ISO taxonomy standard (Broader Than/Narrower Than, etc.) - the model structure can be extended to include any type of named mapping between terms or classes of terms. We are also not limited to a single "Scope Note" term definition field - any number of note type, choice type or attribute type additional "term information" fields can be captured. This flexibility, and the multiple exports and review outputs available means there huge scope for knowledge management teams to use Semaphore Ontology Manager as one of their main technology tools.

Modeling 50 years of manned space flight data through ontologies

A recent project with the Johnson Space Center provided us with the challenge, led by their Chief Knowledge Officer, to help them model the center's 50 years of manned space flight data.  Much of the data was available in one form or another, but not accessible in a way users and systems could readily access.

For example, the details of the past missions are all available on a website but the organic growth of this log makes it impossible to ask contextual questions across the content. Semaphore captured all the information in an ontology and made it easily accessible through NASA's Google Search Appliance results, so users get a full picture of all related, and relevant, content for their search query.

Modeling health and social care in the UK with ontologies and taxonomies

In the medical and social care domains there are many detailed ontologies and taxonomies; Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and Standardized Nomenclature for Medicine (SNOMED) are amongst the better known.  These structures are predominantly built by experts and practitioners, for experts and practitioners - to assist with diagnosis, prescribing, etc.  

The UK's National Health Service wanted a model to help ordinary people, the "end-user" of their services to understand not only more about conditions and diseases, but also route them to information on staying healthy to avoid health problems, to long term care options, to their legal rights.

The classes of information and unlimited named relationships in Ontology Manager allowed us to model the space, one of the outputs being a graphical "explorer" tool that a user can browse round to understand more about a topic.