Fuzzy ontology used for knowledge mobilization

Knowledge mobilization is a transition from the prevailing knowledge management to a new methodology through some innovative methods for knowledge representation, formation, and development and for knowledge retrieval and distribution. The context is industrial processes and finding solutions to complex problems that arise and for which at least partial solutions have been documented. The fact that a problem has been solved before normally makes it easier to solve it again and the existence of documents that describe how it was solved supports the problem-solving process. But documents that describe the problem solving have to be retrieved from a large database of documents and the information that describes the content of a document is not precise. We show that fuzzy ontology will be useful for finding a sufficiently small set of documents that are relevant for the problem solving even if they are imprecisely classified with keywords. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.