Towards an Information Ontology for Knowledge Asset Trading

The overall objective of the INKASS ("Intelligent Knowledge Asset Sharing and Trading") project is to develop an intelligent Internet-based marketplace of knowledge assets. More specifically, the project aims: (1) To develop and validate intelligent agent-based and ontology-enabled knowledge trading tools for facilitating automatic transactions in the marketplace and supporting semantic mappings between sellers' provisions and buyers' needs, (2) To develop and validate innovative business models for a virtual knowledge marketplace, and (3) To apply, validate and exploit the INKASS system as an electronic marketplace for knowledge assets that assists European SMEs in meeting their knowledge needs in specific business management and engineering areas. At the core of our technological approach stands a comprehensive metadata description of information objects which represent tradeable knowledge assets. The structure of these metadata frames is determined by the INKASS Information Ontology which is discussed in its first version in this paper