h-TechSight at AIChE

I was pleasantly surprised today to hear a knowledge management paper presented. The research group of Antonis Kokossis at the U of Surrey has been involved in the h-TechSight project through an EU grant.

The basic idea for h-TechSight seems to be that they want to enable organizations to monitor the scientific literature to look for "new" or "evolving" areas that are of interest to the business or person. This entails devloping an ontology for your area of interst, although the presenter clearly said that this is a "dynamic ontology" that will change with changes in the area of interest.

Unfortunately, the overall system was not described terribly well, and the topic only served to confuse people at the session, some of whom were familiar with the concepts of knowledge management and ontologies. For example, someone wanted to know "what is knowledge," and the speaker didn't have a satisfactory answer to the question. Also, it is not clear how this is different from what corporate librarians do with access to much cleaner databases than simply what is available on the web.