The project's basics
Museums, research institutes, libraries and other knowledge organisations increasingly turn to the Internet for the production, presentation and the management of their knowledge.
The amount of information that becomes available via the web increases each day. Knowledge institutes are continuously concerned with the question of how they can (1) attract information seekers to their website, and (2) how they can offer users optimal searchability once they have accessed their website. The RNA project focuses on the second aspect.
Dynamic knowledge systems
The starting point of the RNA project is that the production and presentation of knowledge works best in a network environment. This can be a network within a knowledge institute or a network shared between organisations. The project deals with pragmatic ways to implement these knowledge networks as dynamic systems.
Precise findability is realised with the use of reference networks, sets of reference structures (e.g. ontologies, thesauri, taxonomies, et cetera, used for findabilitiy) and related content metadata. Also various sorts of object descriptions can be part of a reference network.
Reference structures can be interlinked in such a way that a conceptually and structurally transparent whole is created for both content producers and end users. As a result of this linking, content referred by concepts in individual reference structures can be accessed as if being part of a single collection.
From this perspective, a knowledge system can be described as the combination of knowledge repositories (content), a reference network, and all the relations between them. Both content and reference network are typically dynamic sets. For reasons of viability of the system, updating connections between the two - necessary after any mutation - should be as much as possible an automated procedure. A system which fulfils this requirement can be considered a dynamic knowledge system.
The RNA project focuses on two key aspects of dynamic knowledge systems:
- connecting content to reference structures in an easy, clean and continuous way, and
- mutually connecting reference structures to form a network that supports reliable and meaningful findability of the related content.
Set-up of the project
The RNA project experiments with a range of solutions for digital knowledge sharing. We deploy technologies that have already proven themselves in practice, but have not or hardly been associated, or have not yet been applied in the field of (in particular) cultural heritage.
The RNA project applies these solutions in a number of use cases that together provide a representative picture of the urgent questions in the field of knowlegde sharing to which many knowledge institutions are currently trying to find an answer.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008