MindShare : knowledge sharing via personalized views on a composite ontology

Abstract

Ontologies, or ways of categorizing and describing things, have application to organizing information for human access and allowing software agents to exchange knowledge. The traditional approaches to ontology development involve dedicated effort by a small team of knowledge engineers in a slow and expensive process. We show that a composite ontology of information resources can be constructed from the personal ontologies of individuals in an organization via an ongoing process that combines normal personal organizing activities with low-impedence computer mediation. The MindShare approach is designed to facilitate this process within an organization of people who wish both to organize internal and public information for their personal benefit, and to leverage information previously discovered by others within the organization. MindShare software provides the user with an animated graphical ontology browser for organizing Web documents according to his or her personal ontology, and also for accessing the composite ontology as extensions of the personal ontology with an assisted bimodal browsing interface. The personal ontologies are mapped to the composite ontology by a process that includes MindShare term-based information retrieval methods to suggest existing topics when a user chooses to add a topic, and a variety of user interface affordances that encourage the user to add exposed pieces of the composite ontology to their personal ontology (and later build upon those pieces). We implemented the MindShare software and conducted an initial trial with a small group of users. The MindShare approach behaved as hoped, suggesting that the approach has promise and merits further investigation.