see also What is Knowledge Base Publishing

The Montague Institute's Knowledge Base Publishing system is used internally to manage its research, publishing, and administrative functions. It is also available to members and course participants in two formats:

A - Z indexes. Presented in a traditional back-of-the-book format, the Montague Institute Review index terms points to Web pages and articles on the Montague Institute Web site. The Index includes a subject hierarchy (table of contents), thesaurus for cross references, definitions for many terms, and listings for people and organizations.

Teaching Lab. The same system provides each course participant with a private work area to create a document repository, controlled vocabulary, thesaurus, and list of experts. Participants can view their data in a private version of the Montague Institute A - Z format as well as a tabbed navigation format and can export their Lab data at the end of the course.

At the conclusion of the learning experience, data entered into the Lab for a course project can be exported in Excel format, hosted indefinitely on the Montague Institute server, or deployed in a custom version of the Knowledge Base system installed on the participant's own server.

Five kinds of metadata
The Montague Knowledge Base contains metadata for people, organizations, products, terms, thesaurus relationships, and documents. Participants can populate the Lab via an import function or by direct queries in real time. They can extract metadata from the Lab via an export function (including XML formats) or by direct requests from another application. We use these functions to reduce metadata creation and maintenance costs, improve the efficiency of our search engine, and increase the productivity of authors, editors, and researchers.

The following screen shot shows the thesaurus data entry screen and the same data displayed as an A - Z index.

click image to enlarge	Thesaurus data entry view Teaching Lab data entry form for controlled vocabulary terms and thesaurus. Unlike most thesaurus management programs, users can associate documents, images, and other content objects with each term.
click image to enlarge	Thesaurus A - Z view A -Z index in tabbed format showing terms, cross references, and associated documents. Additional tabs show a list of subjects (topic hierarchy), lists of people and organizations, and search. Users can search by author, title, publication date, index term or category, and "facets" such as country or theme.
click image to enlarge	Thesaurus data in SharePoint search results A customized SharePoint search results page showing thesaurus data from the Lab. A custom Web part grabs the text that the user types in the searcdh box and submits it as a search of the Lab database. Results are returned and formatted for display in the SharePoint Best Bets zone. The custom Web part not only displays thesaurus relationships (which are not possible in SharePoint 2010) but also eliminates manual entry of Best Bets data.

The articles in the sidebar are about how the Montague Institute developed and uses its Knowledge Base Publishing system, both for internal operations and as a teaching tool.

Created on October 27, 1997 l Updated on August 9, 2012