From information to knowledge: introducing WebStract´s knowledge engineering approach

Information overload is a problem because of the overwhelming volume of data that has become accessible through the Internet or other mass communication media. It is difficult for users to sift through this data and to locate useful knowledge because large amounts of unorganized, raw data are confusing to search engines as well as people. WebStract is an experimental tool to assist in the qualification, organization and distribution of information. It offers semi-automated mechanisms to transform raw electronic data into domain knowledge and it provides multiple views for easier user consumption. After introducing WebStract, the paper focuses on the three stage transformation process that is used to transform raw data into domain knowledge. The three stages are knowledge extraction, knowledge elucidation and knowledge presentation. Knowledge extraction retrieves information from electronic documents (e.g., accessible through the WWW) and analyzes it for useful syntactical patterns that are stored in a database. Knowledge elucidation analyzes the syntactical patterns, in a semi-automated fashion, to produce a prioritized, hierarchical summary of the original documents. A fuzzy filtering mechanism allows retrieval of the stored knowledge and the resulting organized summary is presented using the familiar "book" metaphor. Each book can provide several viewpoints for users to review the information. A main application of WebStract is the support of problem based learning in on-line course delivery. WebStract is currently in its third generation of development.