From Natural Language Documents to Sharable Product Knowledge: A Knowledge Engineering Approach

A great part of the product knowledge in manufacturing enterprises is only available in the form of natural language documents. The know-how recorded in these documents is an essential resource for successful competition in the market. From the viewpoint of knowledge management, however, documents have a severe limitation: They do not capture the wealth of knowledge contained in these documents, since the entire knowledge is not spelled out on the linguistic surface. In order to overcome this limitation, the notion of a document as a particular kind of realization of (or view on) the underlying knowledge is introduced. The paper discusses the major steps in realizing this approach to documents: Knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, and techniques to automatically generate multilingual documents from knowledge bases. Further, the paper describes how the required product knowledge can be represented in a sharable and reusable way.