Semantic Indexing of a Competence Map to Support Scientific Collaboration in a Research Community

This paper describes a methodology to semiautomatically acquire a taxonomy of terms and term definitions in a specific research domain. The taxonomy is then used for semantic search and indexing of a knowledge base of scientific competences, called Knowledge Map. The KMap is a system to support research collaborations and sharing of results within and beyond a European Network of Excellence. The methodology is general and can be applied to model any web community starting from the documents shared and exchanged among the community members and to use this model for improving accessibility of data and knowledge repositories.