Knowledge management and other approaches to structuring and linking information offered from diverse knowledge resources provide ways to meet ad hoc information needs. The central idea is to use metadata or ?a system of structured semantic knowledge? [9] to describe the types of information objects available and the relationships between them. The main research interest in this article concentrates on exploring the potential of semi-automatic metadata annotation mechanisms and developing intuitive navigation and visualization concepts. We will describe the concepts behind and the development of an information system supporting ontology-based knowledge management for the city council of Stuttgart which was supposed to improve the efficiency and reliability of internal workflows by enabling all employees to use integrated knowledge and information sources. After this brief introduction the second section gives an overview over relevant concepts related to semantics and ontologies and how metadata for an ontology for community management can be gathered. The third section deals with knowledge organization and topic maps as an approach to meet ad hoc information needs. Technical questions and design aspects concerning the integration of information resources into the topic map and the visualization are discussed in section four and five. In section six we describe the protoype which was developed in the course of an explorative project and section seven draws conclusions on the experiences gained.     «

Knowledge management and other approaches to structuring and linking information offered from diverse knowledge resources provide ways to meet ad hoc information needs. The central idea is to use metadata or ?a system of structured semantic knowledge? [9] to describe the types of information objects available and the relationships between them. The main research interest in this article concentrates on exploring the potential of semi-automatic metadata annotation mechanisms and developing intuit...     »