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knowledge is built step by step in a collective way and is the resulting from the study
and validation of information by the domain expert community. Knowledge mapping
is composed of three phases: 1) Context analysis through the domain experts inter-
viewing. 2) Collective appropriation of relevant information carried out by experts. 3)
Information validation and information recognition by experts and potential users. We
are especially interested in the acquisition of business knowledge regarding tech-
niques, practices and skills required to design and realize a specific handicraft prod-
uct. In the following, we are mentioning five approaches for business knowledge
management:
- The Social and cooperative approach consists in the study of the interactions be-
tween group members thus to offer tools and methods to structure and enhance
exchanged knowledge and facilitate the reuse.
- The Bottom-up approach consists in identifying and extracting concepts and the
reasoning of the domain taking into account sources like deliverable, reports,
emails, etc.
- The Top-down approach consists in a first of all in mapping the domain
knowledge and then the system or the cogniticians interact with experts in order to
extract the necessary information.
- The Decisional approach consists in the knowledge capitalization and reuse in
order to support the decision making.
- The Organisational approach takes into account the social dimension in order to
structure knowledge and especially to facilitate the share of formalized knowledge
among. New technologies can support this fact.
This knowledge is structured into ontologies. According to [13], we can classify on-
tologies as followed: 1) The generic or upper ontology is specifying common abstract
concepts subsuming the terms belonging to a wide range of domain ontologies. It can
be applicable in various contexts; 2). The domain ontology is only specifying
knowledge related to a specific one particular domain such as medicine, agronomy,
policy, GIS etc. Another relevant definition is given in [9], where authors assert that
domain ontology models the information known about a particular subject and there-
fore should closely match the level of information found in a textbook on that subject;
3) Business ontology: It is focused in the formalization of the knowledge regarding a
specific business. It is dealing with actors, resources, processes defining this business.
4) Task ontology or process ontology: it describes the vocabulary specific to a task or
an activity integrated in the completion of a determined final target. Besides, this
ontology specifies a reasoning process towards a specific goal. 5) Application ontolo-
gy: It is dedicated to a specific application and it includes enough knowledge to struc-
ture a particular domain. An additional dimension when applied to ontology is ena-
bling the transfer from static ontology structure to a dynamic one ensuring its evolu-
tion online. This dimension is always called context, situation or simply environment
and is very useful mainly to support decision making respectively to contextual
changes.
Abstract, business and task ontologies with instances are used in the handicraft
women’s project. We aim to define different abstraction levels such as: 1) a generic
level which is the same for all handicraft business, 2) a business level for one specific
handicraft business such as ceramic, 3) an instance level to create detailed typologies
such as the categories of ovens (electric, with wood, etc). Several operations such as
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