Cross-Domain Crawling for Innovation

Innovations, in any field, originate in the mind of people, on the base of mechanisms not yet completely understood. There have been many studies relevant to thinking techniques that have been proven to favor creativity, like for instance those studied by De Bono. A general characteristic of these techniques is the recommendation of avoiding usual thinking paths, habitual mind frames: this is facilitated by putting oneself in unusual physical settings, or introducing absurd concepts, and the like. The use of metaphors is another recognized enabler of creativity, by bridging different conceptual domains.

A Knowledge Base (KB) structured around an Ontology can be seen as a close simulation of the conceptual structure that, according to Constructivism, supports a person’s thinking processes, and the Web can be seen as the corresponding world to be explored and that contributes to that person’s culture. This kind of domain specific KBs is being organized and used as support for advanced enterprise information systems. This paper presents a technique for extending the working domain (WD) of an organization with concepts belonging to other domains, obtained by retrieving documents that discuss both concepts of this WD and “foreign” ones. These documents, proposed to the KB editors, are considered candidates for innovative problem solving activities and considerations.