Leveraging Knowledge from Different Communities Using Ontologies

The purpose of this paper is to provide research based understanding of leveraging knowledge and managing knowledge within and across several communities using the poverty domain as a case study. We hypothesize that leveraging knowledge with a good taxonomy and a good integration process are good approaches to organize and share knowledge. Problems appear when a group of people in different communities share data and collaborate using different perceptions, different concepts, different terms (terminologies), and different semantics to represent the same reality. In this paper we present an approach to solve this problem. We will generate a common set of terms based on the terms of several different storage devices, used by different communities, in order to make data retrieval independent of the different perceptions and terminologies used by those communities. We use ontologies to represent the particular knowledge of each community and discuss the use of mapping and integration techniques to find correspondences between the concepts used in those ontologies.