Along with our core services, i.e. interpreting and translation, we offer terminology and knowledge management (KM). Our first contract in the field was with the French space agency (CNES) for which we work as a supervising contractor handling subcontractor companies and developing collaborative solutions and automatic language processing aspects.

The Terminology/KM division takes on projects for managing/creating knowledge sharing spaces (Wikis or community portals) and terminology resources for optimising documentation retrieval, indexing and classification systems. We also design professional knowledge transfer modules (for handovers following retirement or changes in job positions, for example).

Technology watch and information and documentation management:

• Information searching and text-mining
• Semantic search engines
• Categorisation (automatic addition of metadata) / documentation classification
• Knowledge structuring and collaborative spaces

Process of acquiring knowledge from documents (linguistic corpus) that are representative of the field/profession in question:
– Terminology extraction
– Clustering
– Development of semantic networks
– Modelling of semantic networks in the form of thesauri or ontologies

Validation by several experts in the field is an integral part of the process.

For any company, when an employee leaves (on retirement, or by changing jobs, or being promoted elsewhere), there is often a loss of know-how, knowledge, information in general and hence of efficiency for the company. The ideal solution consists in setting up a transition pair, the replacement employee and the future ex-employee, who work together for several months so that the former can learn from the latter.

However, this is not always possible :

• For financial reasons, when the company has to pay two employees for a single job for an extended period of time;
• Or when, due to lack of resources, the replacement employee is not always available for this coaching work, or if no one has yet been chosen to replace the leaving employee; in some cases, fellow employees will temporarily handle the leaver’s tasks.

Our intervention involves several stages before the employee leaves :

• Auditing, sorting, classifying and enhancing the value of documentation
• Gathering information from the leaver about his/her specialised knowledge, skills, techniques networks, etc.
• Gathering information from the working community on their perception of the leaver’s competence that they will most miss when the person leaves.
• Modelling the information collected so that it can be made available to the replacement person or to a community.