An Approach to Knowledge Formalization

Just a few years after its birth, Knowledge Management drew the attention of the academic world, becoming a matter of intense study as the scientific community has always felt the need to create the cooperation among its members allowing the information exchange. Many disciplines develop several standardized formalization that domain experts can use to share information as reusable knowledge. The purpose of this chapter is the study of a process to formalize knowledge by using an iterative approach mixing a top-down and bottom up analysis of a specific domain and the bottom-up analysis for the information in the object of the specific domain. Our case study analyzes the domain of descriptions and reviews of Italian wines. We start by analyzing the information collected from the Web in order to define a taxonomy able to represent the knowledge related to the above mentioned domain.