Semantically enriched microposts in the enterprise: A practical approach

The so-called Web 2.0 paradigm and, in particular, the trend of microblogging, have empowered millions of users in the open Web. Additionally, these approaches are slowly penetrating into the industry, into what is referred to as Enterprise 2.0, helping employees overcome the entry barriers of Knowledge Management systems, by which companies intend to fully tap into their collective knowledge. The lightweight aspect of microblogging solutions is especially relevant from the “knowledge providing” side, as its simplicity helps employees overcome the hurdles that discourage them from a strong and active participation. On the other hand, and importantly enough, the “knowledge consuming” side is not to be disregarded, as the lack of truly evolved intelligent technologies that allow employees to easily benefit from the global knowledge provided by them and other users, is a potential pitfall for such systems. Both sides and their needs can sometimes require opposite approaches, tending the current solutions to be not user friendly enough to encourage participation or not intelligent enough for them to be useful. In this paper, a semantically enriched microblogging framework for Knowledge Management is proposed based on the combination of two layers that cater to each need: a microblogging layer that simplifies how users interact with the whole system and a semantically powered engine that performs all the intelligent heavy lifting by combining semantic indexing and search of microposts and users. Different mechanisms are also presented as extensions that can be plugged-in on demand and help expanding the capabilities of the whole system.