An Interoperable Knowledge Representation in Distributed Environment

The introduction of the World Wide Web and the consequent growth of other supporting technologies posed many new challenges to knowledge representation and management process. The most notable challenge is how to manage efficiently the volume and heterogeneity of information produced on the Web each day such that different information management can exchange their knowledge in a platform independence way. The World Wide Web is distributed by nature (inherently) and hence knowledge representation in distributed environment has become core aspect in efficient knowledge management process to be implemented in distributed environment.

In a distributed environment such as Web, it is very much essential that information created/captured at different places and stored on different hardware and software architecture are inter operable; so that different information system can communicate, exchange, compile and merge the information in order to meet the dynamic need of potential users.

There are many approaches for coping with the information representation problem in distributed environment. One of these approaches is to use ontology, for capturing the knowledge represented by various distributed information sources. The ontology provides inter operable storage of information that can be viewed and manipulated declaratively. The Ontology Representation Languages also provide the means of sharing and combining the knowledge by soft bots very easily and effectively that would have been difficult in earlier era of files based system or database system because of several reasons. This paper illustrates the case study showing how ontology can be used to create inter operable information representation for the academic domain and also shows the use of the Ontology Representation tool, Protégé, that can be used to provide support for modeling complex ontologies of the given domain.