An Ontological Document Management System

Abstract

Document Management Systems (DMS) form the cornerstone of all business and management information systems. They are sustaining the pyramid of a company’s internal knowledge and are designed to provide rapid document retrieval to knowledge workers, reduce error rates, control access to documents, and significantly improve business performance [1]. Document Management Systems try to give the users control over their companies’ institutionalized knowledge. In this context, recent developments such as the Open Document Management API (ODMA [2]) for simplifying the integration and interoperability of standard desktop applications with Document Management Systems, as well as the emergence of standards for representing knowledge in open formats (e.g. OWL for ontologies [3]) change the way DMS are perceived. They are no longer mere sophisticated search engines, but have evolved into increasingly complex systems for creation, management, control and dissemination of knowledge throughout the company. The knowledge must be integrated into the companies business processes, products and services. This helps companies become more innovative and agile providers of high quality products and customer services. Moreover, companies’ web sites are often alimented by the content provided by a DMS. Especially Web sites targeting user support are based upon the companies internal DMS. This is also true for intranets providing up to date information to the companies collaborators. Most of the intraand extranets are based on some form of Content Management Systems (CMS) [4, 5]. The goal of these systems is the collaborative creation of documents and other forms of content. This process is very closely related to document management. On the one hand the content created in