Adaptive knowledge retrieval using semantically enriched folksonomies

Organizations invest considerable development effort in personalized systems to reap the benefits of knowledge management. Competition and the need for innovation imply in ever-changing and emerging needs that result in costly effort to redesign such systems. A flexible knowledge management approach should achieve personalization for organizations by adapting to the domain of the organization, meanwhile simplifying the incorporation of future knowledge retrieval needs. We describe such an approach that employs a knowledge management platform at its core, which supports adding and removing multiple folksonomies, constantly enriches them with semantics and provides domain-specific recommendations and semantic search capabilities. This approach to knowledge retrieval has been applied to the domain of homemade explosives and counter-terrorism efforts as part of the HOMER project. Preliminary evaluation from the perspective of the end-users - law enforcement, security and related agencies - is presented.