Semantic Indexing of a Competence Map to support Scientific Collaboration in a Research Community

This paper describes a methodology to semiautomatically acquire a taxonomy of terms and term definitions in a specific research domain. The taxonomy is then used for semantic search and indexing of a knowledge base of scientific competences, called Knowledge Map. The KMap is a system to support research collaborations and sharing of results within and beyond a European Network of Excellence. The methodology is general and can be applied to model any web community - starting from the documents shared and exchanged among the community members and to use this model for improving accessibility of data and knowledge repositories.