Keyword-orientated searching is an integral component of research information strategy in the arts and humanities – as organic as looking up a word in a dictionary or browsing the index of a book. The situation is further complicated when keyword-orientated searching is applied to bespoke databases, accessed through application-specific interfaces. The process is commonly described as the 'mining of knowledge' as distinct from the 'retrieval of data' of the kind achieved by keyword-orientated searching. The datasets that accumulated to create the 'haystack' were, in this respect, very typical of what might expect to find among the various distributed resources available in electronic media in a particular historical or archaeological domain. In reality, there are very few bespoke ontologies for any arts and humanities domains. VICODI is the exception, specifically developed for ontology mapping of European history from its origins to the present.

This paper details the use of Semantic Web tools for supporting networked knowledge acquisition, search and sharing in large distributed organisations. The demonstration will showcase from a user perspective an application developed to aid knowledge management in large organisations, detailing the problems and technical solutions employed.

This paper details an integrated methodology to optimise knowledge reuse and sharing, illustrated with a use case in the aeronautics domain. It uses ontologies as a central modelling strategy for the capture of knowledge from legacy documents via automated means, or directly in systems interfacing with knowledge workers, via user-defined, web-based forms. The domain ontologies used for knowledge capture also guide the retrieval of the knowledge extracted from the data using a semantic search system that provides support for multiple modalities during search. This approach has been applied and evaluated successfully within the aerospace domain, and is currently being extended for use in other domains on an increasingly large scale.

This paper describes hybrid search, a search method supporting both document and knowledge retrieval via the flexible combination of ontology-based search and keyword-based matching. Hybrid search smoothly copes with lack of semantic coverage of document content, which is one of the main limitations of cur-rent semantic search methods. In this paper we define hybrid search formally, discuss its compatibility with the current semantic trends and present a reference implementation: K-Search. We then show how the method outperforms both keyword-based search and pure semantic search in terms of precision and recall in a set of experiments performed on a collection of about 18.000 technical documents. Experiments carried out with professional users show that users understand the paradigm and consider it very powerful and reliable. K-Search has been ported to two applications released at Rolls-Royce plc for searching technical documentation about jet engines.

Modern knowledge management is based on the orchestration of dynamic communities that acquire and share knowledge according to customized schemas. However, while independence of ontological views is favoured, these communities must also be able to share their knowledge with the rest of the organization. In this paper we introduce K-Forms and K-Search, a suite of Semantic Web tools for supporting distributed and networked knowledge acquisition, capturing, retrieval and sharing. They enable communities of users to define their own domain views in an intuitive way (automatically translated into formal ontologies) and capture and share knowledge according to them. The tools favour reuse of existing ontologies; reuse creates as side effect a network of (partially) interconnected ontologies that form the basis for knowledge exchange among communities. The suite is under release to support knowledge capture, retrieval and sharing in a large jet engine company.

A fundamental shift is occurring in many industries away from the selling of products (e.g. cars) to the provision of services (e.g. transport, car leasing). Essential to the long-term success of businesses in this emerging global environment is the creation of new Integrated Products And Services (IPAS). For example in Rolls-Royce plc (RR) the business model is changing from one of selling products (e.g. aircraft engines) and spare parts to one (driven by customer demand) of selling services (e.g. Total Care). This requires knowledge transfer between three very different worlds: new service design, new product design, and the operation of existing products and services in the field: the new product designer and the new service designer require significantly increased access to data on the behaviour of existing products in the field.

The acquisition, sharing and reuse of knowledge is a prime challenge in large organisations. Doris is a framework for defining Knowledge Management applications based on Semantic Web technologies that enables flexible means of capturing knowledge and of searching and exploring the knowledge and the documents where it is contained. Applications of Doris are employed in the aerospace domain at Rolls-Royce plc and in the domain of exploring and searching archives about London of the 18th century.