Using virtual documents to move information retrieval and knowledge management closer together.

ABSTRACTWhile Information Retrieval approaches typically rely on a bag-of-word approach and are therefore fairly shallow, Knowledge Management is based on a deep semantic representation. Both allow users to sift through huge volumes of information and to identify the relevant document or answer for a particular information need. Obviously, these areas go beyond this simple information access scenario. Nevertheless, it is also a fact that these areas form fairly separate communities. We propose an idea of how to make use of techniques coming from both ends of the spectrum and combine them in methods that are more powerful than each of them individually. Our idea is based on turning structured information into virtual documents built to preserve the concepts and relations inherent in the semantically rich data before we apply Information Retrieval methods.