Knowledge management comes in many flavors but has to be tightly integrated with content management. Key is access to up-to-date, complete, and consistent information. Three techniques give access to the needed information: search, navigation, and notification. But it is not sufficient just to provide access to information. The quality of the information is key as well. Professional content management feeding the knowledge access layer assures the requested quality.

Content Lifecycle Management

Most of the organization's information is captured in documents. Therefore, content management is a backbone technology for knowledge management. Fragmented XML documents and other 'ordinary' document formats have to be edited, reviewed, and released before published. The complete content lifecycle requires several management paradigms to cope with content, variants, re-use, metadata, links, workflow, archive.

Navigation in Meta-Structures

Users navigate in information when they have an appropriate starting point. Navigation can follow hyperlinks between information objects -- the well-known navigation through link networks. But navigation can also follow meta-structures like table of content, back-of-the-book index, glossary, thesaurus, subject classification, semantic network. XML Topic Maps (XTM) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) are seen as the standards of choice to model the listed meta-structures over any kind of data formats.

Intelligent Searching

But what to do if there is no starting point, no link network, no meta-structure? Searching is the answer. But neither full-text nor relational SQL queries provide satisfying results. Mathematical search approaches analyses of the texts may work but will lead to completely unexpected and wrong results when the 'text cheats the math'.

What could be a solution? We are looking for a 'find' technology that works simultaneously on any kind of free-text and data, that returns fuzzy hits in a perfectly ordered result list considering the user preferences, that shows how good the hits match the query, that starts a dialog with the user to refine the query, that highlights the query terms in the results and explains why a result is a result, that avoids complex query syntax but understands natural language, that monitors the user interactions, and -- most important -- is controlled by a maintainable knowledge model.

Profile Driven Push Technology

Lazy users do not want to check every day if a certain information is has been added to the knowledge space -- they want to be informed. Every new information added to the knowledge space is checked against the profiles describing the user interests. If an information matches the profile the user is notified about it.

The empolis Knowledge Suite

The empolis Knowledge Suite (eKS) is a rich set of modules and service components providing the necessary functions and features to build sophisticated knowledge management solutions for globally operating organizations. All listed requirements for content lifecycle management, complex meta-structures, intelligent search, and profile driven push technology are covered by eKS. The Content Lifecycle Management module is empolis' answer to all enterprise content management requirements. The Meta-Structures module implements XTM as well as RDF and is an easy to integrate middleware for explicit knowledge structures and complex metadata over any kind of resources. The Intelligent Search module is empolis' AI-based find technology providing advanced and innovative knowledge retrieval. Furthermore the service components integrated in eKS offer connectors to 3rd party tools, automated synchronization between the integrated tools, user access right control, user notification, collaboration support, skill finder, feedback and FAQ handling. The collection of the content management, meta-structures, and search modules offers together with the service components a unique combination of unique tools. empolis officially announces the empolis Knowledge Suite 1.0 at XML Europe 2002.