Knowledge management and human language: crossing the chasm

Purpose – Seeks to explore the gap that exists between knowledge management (KM) systems and the natural language materials that form almost all corporate data stores. Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual discussion and approach are taken using recent scientific results in the fields of the semantic web and ontology‐based information extraction. Findings – Provides a high‐level introduction to information extraction (IE) and descriptions of application scenarios for KM tools that exploit IE, a form of natural language analysis to link semantic web models with documents. The paper presents some examples of ontology‐based IE systems, one of which, KIM, is under development in the SEKT Project. KIM offers IE‐based facilities for metadata creation, storage and conceptual search. The system can be used by diverse applications for annotating and querying documents. Originality/value – Focuses on technologies and facilities that will become an important part of next‐generation KM applications.