SMWCon Fall 2013/Building enterprise knowledge using semantic encyclopedias

The MITRE Gestalt Framework (MGF) is a set of extensions and design patterns based on MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki used to build enterprise semantic encyclopedias. Using the MGF, our team constructed more than 50 semantic encyclopedias with varying levels of success and adoption. MITRE is a not-for-profit company that operates several federally-funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) which provide systems engineering and advanced technology solutions to government customers. MITRE fosters a culture of knowledge sharing and employees are encouraged to apply what is learned from addressing one customer's challenges to similar issues faced by other customers.

Our team began using Semantic MediaWiki in 2006 when we were asked to summarize MITRE activities related to one of our capability areas – human language technology (HLT). We recognized the difficulties associated with finding documents across document management systems as well as reusing document information. We chose Semantic MediaWiki to build our first topic-centric encyclopedia about HLT called Languapedia. Once the word was out about the usefulness of organizing information using wikis, we were asked to build semantic encyclopedias for robotics, mobile computing, acquisition, systems engineering, experimentation, radar, and social media. In this talk, we will give examples including live demonstrations of several wikis that we have developed. We will present lessons learned that contribute to the successful adoption of semantic encyclopedias in a corporate environment. We will discuss our future objectives, including the federation of enterprise encyclopedias as chapters within a corporate semantic encyclopedia.