=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-209/paper-12
|storemode=property
|title=SASA - A Semi-Automatic Semantic Annotator for Personal Knowledge Management
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-209/saaw06-short03-tighe.pdf
|volume=Vol-209
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/semweb/TigheR06
}}
==SASA - A Semi-Automatic Semantic Annotator for Personal Knowledge Management==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-209/saaw06-short03-tighe.pdf
SASA- a Semi-Automatic Semantic Annotator for Personal
Knowledge Management
Kim Tighe, Sean O’Riain
Semantic Infrastructure Research Group
Hewlett-Packard, Galway, Ireland
Tel.:+353-91-754901
{ktighe,sean.oriain}@hp.com
ABSTRACT increasingly depend upon their ability to becoming a knowledge-
Best practice organisations have realised that people and their rich knowledge managing organisation [2]. Organisations that
knowledge remain their greatest assets and will continue to be the focus solely on the application of their collective intellectual
largest contributory factor in obtaining future competitive capital to achieve objectives run the risk of neglecting the
advantage. Knowledge fundamentally derived from people in the fundamental truth that knowledge is derived from people [3].
absence of their understanding, personal context and application Lacking the human element of understanding, personal context
remains largely as obscure information. Current personal and application, knowledge within an organisation remains
knowledge management (PKM) activities do not adequately largely as obscure information. Supporting individuals in their
support the finding, reminding, reuse and collaboration of PKM is therefore vital and will be the single largest contributory
information. In this paper we propose a novel PKM tool called factor in gaining future competitive advantage over the next 25
SASA, a semi-automatic semantic annotator of PDF documents, years [4].
which will enable collecting, connecting and collaborating of Enabling technologies for the WWW have provided knowledge
discovered information to facilitate knowledge sharing and workers with rich information sources but have also resulted in
personal content management within a business setting. SASA, a adding to the existing considerable volume of information that
plug-in for Adobe Acrobat Professional, utilises Semantic Web can be searched and queried. The classical Information Retrieval
technologies to enable building, augmenting and sharing of (IR) problem of identification and retrieval of current information
ontologies amongst knowledge workers. Within an ontology for activities such as informed decision making remains
named entities are connected to additional information such as problematic. The core focus of PKM is directed at improving
Web pages, documents, mail messages, personal notes, and wikis. individual efficiency. Current activities however remain limited
SASA automatically derives the context of the document, lacking adequate support for the finding, reminding, reuse and
highlights named entities and applies the relevant additional collaboration of information [5]. There remains a growing need
information. The business case for such a tool is outlined and user for intuitive processes and PKM based tools to assist the worker
scenario development used to illustrate how SASA will assist in evaluating not only their own knowledge but also a means to
Business Client Account Managers in the laborious process of augment it by exploration and learning from additional
reviewing, annotating and gathering information from customer information sources. Maximising human capital on a personal
documentation by enhancing their PKM. level leads to enhancing individual effectiveness in a manner that
improves productivity for both the individual and enterprise [6]. It
Categories and Subject Descriptors is our contention that PKM enhanced with Semantic Web
I.I.7 [Computing Methodologies]: Document and Text technologies can be used to assist in achieving this productivity
Processing – General. J.0 [Computer Applications]: General. gain.
The Semantic Web [7] envisages annotating document content by
General Terms assigning to entites in the text links to their semantic descriptions
Management, Economics, Experimentation from domain ontologies to make it easier for machines to assist
humans in finding, sharing, combining, and reusing information.
Current semantic annotation tools (e.g. KIM [8], Trailblazer [16] 1
Keywords and tools based on Annotea 2 or CREAM [9]) cater for document
Semantic Annotation, Personal Knowledge Management, PDF annotation of Web-native formats such as HTML and XML. None
however cater for the Portable Document Format (PDF [10] 3 ), a
1. INTRODUCTION format prevalent in virtually all market segments and used
In a rapidly changing global economy unified by improved extensively for document interchange and publishing.
communication and transportation, people and their knowledge
are an organisation’s greatest assets [1]. The constant emergence
of new products and competitors combined with an increasing 1
global marketplace are challenges facing an organisation’s ability http://www.hp.com/ie/galway/sirg/trailblazer/
2
to survive in an increasingly unpredictable and competitive http://www.annotae.org/
environment. An enterprise’s continued existence will 3
A de facto standard on the Web alongside HTML.
With the advent of the Semantic Web this paper examines how comments that are difficult to identify and retrieve particularly for
Semantic Web enabling technologies, namely semantic annotation new document versions. Increasing the customer base, scope
can be applied to the area of PKM to enhance knowledge worker expansion, EUWM organisational expansion and having to
productivity and efficiency. This paper proposes a novel tool, comply with standards such as ISO 7 frameworks has led to a
SASA for semi-automatic semantic annotation of PDF considerable increase in documentation volume and the level of
documents, which will enable collecting, connecting and manual effort required.
collaborating amongst knowledge workers to facilitate knowledge
There is a clear opportunity for an intuitive tool that would assist
sharing and personal content management within a business
the consultants in performing documentation review and in
setting.
information gathering process in order to improve both
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 collaboration and traceability of document findings. Currently
outlines the business case. Section 3 illustrates the scenario under active development SASA is such a tool that offers the
development. Section 4 presents our proposed solution. Section 5 semi-automatic semantic annotation of PDF documents. Its usage
compares related work. Section 6 concludes this paper and will contribute towards a reduction in the level of effort required
outlines future work. in each new project stage, cost reduction and increased team
productivity.
2. BUSINESS CASE
HP 4 Services’ Managed Services (MS) provides customers 5 with 3. SCENARIO DEVELOPMENT
strategic outsourcing services and solutions to manage their IT Take for example the situation where a EUWM client account
infrastructures. The MS business unit itself is structured into a manager has to prepare and deliver a Project Definition Document
number of areas of expertise known as towers. Each tower based on the requirements of the U.S. car manufacturing customer
specializes in a particular area such as the End User Workplace “Customer X”, and the capabilities of the delivery organisation
Management (EUWM) which focuses on the end users desktop and support structure. Material used in drawing this information
environment. The EUWM Pre-Sales & Implementation Team is together is contained in a large number of key business
assigned Customer Relationship Management and Project documents such as Statement of Work (SOW), HP Overall Scope
Management activities during the pre-sales and document, Technical Solution Document (TSD), RCM Model,
transition/transformation stages of any customer engagement. Overall HP-Customer Contract and Associated Schedules,
Requests For Information (RFI), Requests For Proposals (RFP),
In each of the above activities, the EUWM consultant’s task of
etc.
understanding, interpreting and producing all relevant support
documentation is crucial for the successful proposal, The assigned account manager firstly accesses the
implementation and delivery of any service. Failing to adequately transition\transformation and delivery documentation, begins the
capture all customer requirements, service limitations and any analysis process in an attempt to identify what is of relevance to
assumptions made will impact customer satisfaction level, the the EUWM tower and what contractually HP are obliged to
delivery organisations ability to succeed, HP’s profitability, and deliver. The Overall HP-Customer Contract is opened with Adobe
ultimately, HP’s ability to win further contracts. Underpinning all Acrobat Professional and using our plug-in SASA creates the
activities is the consultant whom has to ensure that services category 8 “Customer X” for the customer and begins reviewing
scoped in the solution are delivered efficiently and implemented the documentation. With reference to Figure 1, when the account
in adherence to contractual obligations. For that reason, their manager identifies an item of interest such as ‘Application
resulted outputs from reviewing customer documentation such as Packaging’ it is added to the category as a named entity. A note of
Project Definition Document or Project Requirements Document “Due to ITAR 9 U.S. government regulations all Customer X
are essential for the project to initially commence and to continue transmissions must be manufactured within North America” is
on-going successfully. associated with that named entity. As the account managers’
analysis progresses, another document, which is part of the
New EUWM customer undertaking will require the consultant to Associated Schedules documentation, is found to contain a key
begin the laborious process of reviewing, annotating and stipulation regarding where UNIX application packaging must be
gathering information from on average 50 or more substantial performed. Another note is then added to the named entity
documents which typically are received in either Microsoft Word ‘Application Packaging’ along with a bookmark to document
or Adobe PDF format. At present, each document is manually Schedule B, which was found to have the associated information.
reviewed and annotated by the consultant. Central document In this manner peripheral information obtained from sources such
repository systems such as SharePoint 6 are occasionally used for as emails, phones calls and HP-Customer group discussions can
information sharing in addition to documentation notes capture in be used to filter information and associate it with suitable named
an associated mail or Word documents. However, it is not a entities. Once the document review stage has concluded the
standard practice and can lead to problems of omitting key Project Definition Document write up commences. Resulting
from the review the accounts manager now has in effect a
semantically annotated information source.
4
Hewlett-Packard Ltd.
5
Telecom/NSP, financial services, manufacturing and 7
government or public sector markets. International Standards Organisation
8
6
SharePoint is Microsoft collaborative management tool for ‘Category’ is used to represent an ontology.
9
document and information sharing. International Traffic in Arms Regulations
Figure 2 shows that to retrieve the information the manager need Figure 1). The toolbar provides functionality allowing the user to
only click ‘Find Entities’ to have all named entities such as apply or create ontologies and link associated information as
‘Application Packaging’ belonging to the category highlighted. semantic annotations to named entities within the PDF
document’s text content. Dialog windows created using the
Adobe Dialog Manager (ADM) 11 are used to facilitate the
addition of the named entities and their associated information.
SASA stores the ontologies on the users’ local machine in
Resource Description Format (RDF) [11], which makes them
portable amongst groups.
Referring to Figure 3, the SASA application architecture will
contain: 1) A Trainer component to train SASA using the text
and the users’ selected ontology about the context of the currently
viewed PDF document. SASA will extract the text from the
document and use a Vector Space Model (VSM) [12] 12 to
represent the collected training information by using the words
from the document and their frequency of occurrence to augment
the existing training data. 2) A Categorisation component to
derive the context of the currently viewed document using the
Cosine Similarity Measure [13] to compare the text of the
Figure 1. Adding a note to named entity ‘Application document with the training data and calculate from the vectors the
Packaging’ most likely match to the current ontologies. 3) A NEIO
Selection of the named entity ’Application Packaging’ will component to add and delete named entities and their associated
provide visibility of all additional information and annotations information to and from the ontology. 4) An Annotator
from previous documentation reviews. The client account component to semantically annotate the text of the PDF document
manager also has the ability to view a summary of all the named by finding and highlighting named entities of interest and
entites and their associated information (see Figure 2). This assists applying their relevant additional information. 5) An
the accounts manager in ensuring that issues regarding the like of Import/Export component to share ontologies amongst users. 6)
UNIX application packaging and ITAR regulations are factored in A Viewer component to view an entire trail of annotations for a
and captured in the Project Definition Document. Otherwise the selected ontology.
potential knock on effects of overlooking this information could
adversely affect the project timeline, project scope, level of effort
required, and delivery model with ultimately negative commercial
impact.
Figure 3. Overview of SASA Architecture
5. RELATED WORK
SemanticWord [14], a Microsoft Word-based environment, adds
Figure 2. Document annotated showing summary of all named several toolbars to the interface which support the creation of
entities and their associated information semantic annotations in documents and templates according to
selected ontologies. Magpie [15] is a Web browser extension
4. PROPOSED SOLUTION which uses Named Entity Recognition (NER) based on a supplied
SASA is implemented as a plug-in 10 for Adobe Acrobat
Professional. SASA adds a toolbar to the standard interface (see
11
A cross-platform API for implementing dialog interfaces for
10
A dynamically-linked extension to Acrobat, which hooks into Adobe applications such as Acrobat, etc.
12
the user interface and adds functionality to Acrobat An algebraic model used for information filtering and
Professional, Acrobat Standard, or Adobe Reader. information retrieval.
ontology of the user’s choice to highlight and add links to named [2] Davenport, T. H., Prusak L. “Working Knowledge, How
entities on a Web page. Table 1 shows an extract from a recent Organisations Manage What They Know” Harvard Business
survey of semantic annotation tools. It was found that they cater School Press 1997.
primarily for Web native formats such as HTML and XML. [3] Nonaka, I., Takeuchi, M. (1995). The Knowledge Creating
SASA caters for PDF and can be integrated with HPs Mozilla Company – How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics
Firefox extension Trailblazer [16] to allow for HTML also. of Innovation. Oxford, The Oxford University Press.
Table 1. Extract from comparison of annotation tools for [4] Drucker, P. F. “Managing Knowledge Means Managing
requirements 1-7 [17]. Oneself” Leader to Leader. 16(Spring 2000):8-10.
Annotation Semantic [5] Volkel, M., Oren, E. Personal Knowledge Management with
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Tool Word Semantic Wikis Technical Report, AIFB Karlsruhe.
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- - Annotation server
support
Scientific American, May 2001.
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Document Mark-up tied to Kirilov, A. KIM-a semantic platform for information
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6. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK Annual German Conference on AI, September 2003, 2003.
In this paper we have proposed a plug-in for Adobe Acrobat
[10] Portable Document Reference Manual, Fifth Edition, Adobe
Professional called SASA, a novel PKM tool for semi-automatic
Systems Incorporated.
semantic annotation of PDF documents utilising Semantic Web
enabling technologies. SASA allows the user to build, augment http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/index_refere
and share ontologies amongst knowledge workers. Within an nce.html
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SASA will enhance PKM. Our future work plans, aside from [13] Van Rijsbergen. C.J. Information Retrieval, 1979.
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7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Semantic Web Symposium (ESWS), May 2004.
We would like to thank Robert Connolly and Richard Joyce from [16] Tighe, K., Johnston, A. Using Named Entities as a basis for
the EUWM Pre-Sales & Implementation Team, Dara Keogh, and sharing associative trails between Semantic Desktops. 1st
Colman O’Dywer from the Solutions Management Services Team International Semantic Desktop Workshop (ISWC)
at HP Galway for their time and expertise in framing the business November 2005.
case.
[17] Uren, V., Cimiano, P., Iria, J., Handschuh, S., Vargas-Vera,
M., Motta, E., Ciravegna F. Semantic Annotation for
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