h-da Wissenswelt - Publikationsplattform der Hochschule Darmstadt

What is the 'knowledge' of a university? It is the sum of all experiences and all contributions of students and staff. Knowledge ultimately exists, among other things, in the form of theses, articles, lectures and research reports. The largest knowledge pool of a university is made up, however, of the knowledge and expertise of every single member of the university. As a result of the high rate of turnover of people, knowledge and expertise are on the one hand constantly being lost, but this is replaced by a fresh intake of upcoming young students and lecturers reflecting the spirit of their time. In contrast to commercial enterprises, the knowledge of a university is very heterogeneous. The knowledge of a university is a living entity moving at speed and, on account of the many branches of study covered, also forms a part of the current total knowledge of society. In order to model the knowledge of the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt, a semantic ontology was constructed in which, in a first step, all organisational units and people were represented. Furthermore, all publications existing in electronic form were imported and semantic relations were established with people and departments. A networked topic area was created in parallel, which reflects the majority of all relevant topics in the departments. The creation of an h_da specific topic area was achieved by merging and mapping existing ontologies. By semantic linking of publications and lectures with topics, the university ultimately has an experts' portal at its disposal. And the question of who has expert knowledge about topic xy can be answered by a wide range of different semantic relations. The actual value of the new topic world is derived from linking the topics to lectures, projects, books, professional articles, thesis papers and much more. The key to this creation of value is a web-based semantic search, which can, for example, be offered directly on the university main page. The clustering of search results by document and object types ensures clarity. Such a system makes activities and expert knowledge transparent, to the great advantage of all university members.