An ontology-based approach for organizing sharing, and querying knowledge objects on the Web

This paper describes an ontology-based knowledge system for creating and sharing user´s personal objects, with support for querying semantic associations. The user specifies and populates a local ontology, which helps him to organize his personal objects. For users who wish to work cooperatively, or divulgate their personal objects in the so-called community of practices, the system provides a mapping between the local and global ontologies, both defined using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) model. This global ontology is available on a Web server and provides global semantic query capability. The mapping task, as well as the objects organization process, is supported by a thesaurus. It ensures that each user´s view is preserved, as he is able to visualize and query objects using his original vocabulary, independently of the way they have been represented in the global ontology.