A Top-Level Ontology for Smart Document Access

The central idea of this paper is to apply the concept of a top-level ontology to make access and retrieval of resources, more specifically documents, in knowledge-intensive business processes smarter. Supporting the reuse of meta-data created elsewhere, the sharing of meta-data across applications and users as well as the application of meta-data to answer user enquiries about resources requires a mapping between diverse content-oriented meta-data standards. This can be done with the help of a top-level ontology. In this paper, we will analyze a number of widely used meta-data standards for personal information, communication, resource descriptions and specific standards for text, images, audio and video. These cover a wide range of electronic resources typically required by weakly structured, knowledge-intensive business processes which are then mapped to the presented top-level ontology.