In the last decade we have seen the rapid grow of electronically stored information. Organizations aiming to keep the tempo with the lightspeed information society must handle their knowledge value effectively. The aim of knowledge management is to define methods and tools for effective knowledge and information management for organizations.

In the last few years we intensively focused on applying knowledge representational techniques in commercial applications. One successful achievement was the knowledge model based document coding system developed for the Hungarian New Agency (MTI). Based on the experiences and with the help of the GVOP tender, we have developed a general knowledgebase manager platform called Ovitas Knowledge Manager (OKM).

The main concept behind the information organizational capability of OKM is the so-called knowledge map that is placed on top of the existing data and content. The knowledge map consists of nodes and the relation between them (hierarchies, taxonomies, relations, similarities, etc). Nodes can represent any concepts or objects and the relations are represents any kind of meaningful connections between those concepts and objects. The nodes and relations can have properties defining any type of metadata. The external data and content elements (documents, internet pages, files, etc.) can be referenced with special metadata slots on the nodes. This enables that the knowledge map can be integrated seamlessly to storage systems without modifying existing data or content objects.

We have developed a dedicated knowledge representation model for the OKM, which is based on the well known Topic Maps and RDF standards. We combined the advantages of both and added some brand new features to perfectly fit the demands of commercial applications. Both standard format can be imported and exported. The storage layer of OKM uses relational database that ensures high performance even if large amount of data is used.

The presentation gives a short overview of some possible commercial application use cases of knowledge representational techniques. We present concrete solutions through the introduction of OKM and also review their business potential.

The main topics of the presentation are:

- Knowledge management

- Role and importance of knowledge management

- Applying knowledge representation in knowledge management

- Short overview of the OKM software suite

- OKM as a knowledge management tool

- Theoretical background, knowledge representation technology in OKM

- Architecture and functions, main technological aspects

- Customization, integration into target environments

- Application examples of OKM and their added values

- Central knowledge repository for corporations and institutions

- Content delivery with the help of a knowledge map

- Improving textual search with knowledge model