Ontologies in Industrial Enterprise Content Management Systems: the EC2M Project

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems represent a crucial aspect in the efficient and effective management of large-scale enterprises, in particular for those made up of several sites distributed all over the world. Considering the increasing number of documents that large enterprises need to store and manage, and the need of classifying and retrieving them in real time, ECM systems need to be strengthened to represent not only standard “syntactic” information associated with documents but also more complex and structured information to represent the documents’ semantic. In this paper, we present a joint project of the Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics and System Engineering of the University of Genoa, Italy, and two companies, Nacon (part of Sempla Group) and Nis, to create an improved ECM system (named EC2M) exploiting ontologies to better classify, retrieve and share documentation among different sites of the involved companies. The overall architecture of the EC2M system is presented with a detailed description of the ontology that has been created for the first EC2M prototype, modeling the Sempla’s business offers, to let users classify their documents in a semantically-driven way and search them using semantic tags. EC2M is “parametric” in the used ontology: the system is currently used by Sempla, with the ontology presented in this paper.