Ontology-based empirical knowledge verification for professional virtual community

A professional virtual community provides an interactive platform for enterprise experts to create and share their empirical knowledge cooperatively, and the platform contains a tremendous amount of hidden empirical knowledge that knowledge experts have preserved in the discussion process. Therefore, enterprise knowledge management highly prioritises how to verify the empirical knowledge effectively before archiving it into enterprise knowledge repository for reuse. This work develops a novel scheme of ontology-based empirical knowledge verification for professional virtual community to assist domain experts in a professional virtual community to verify the logics of empirical knowledge, thus ensuring the quality of empirical knowledge and providing accurate knowledge decision support for knowledge workers. In particular, this work has the following objectives: propose an empirical knowledge verification model for a professional virtual community, design an ontology-based empirical knowledge verification process, develop techniques related to the ontology-based empirical knowledge verification and implement an ontology-based empirical knowledge verification mechanism with an illustrative example of securities trading. Results of this study facilitate efforts within the professional virtual community to verify empirical knowledge in order to provide knowledge workers with logic-correct empirical knowledge for decision support.