KMi Publications

Tech Reports

Tech Report kmi-98-01 Abstract


Enriching Representations of Work to Support Organisational Learning
Techreport ID: kmi-98-01
Date: 1998
Author(s): Tamara Sumner, John Domingue and Zdenek Zdrahal
Download PDF

The ENRICH project will develop tools and methodologies supporting organisational learning addressing three core business needs: * Supporting individuals and groups to continuously reflect on and improve work practices. * Supporting distributed groups to share 'best practices' and improve their coordination efforts. * Promoting the establishment of 'virtual centres of excellence' that serve to identify core competencies and nurture their development by bringing people together (across time and geography) with relevant expertise. The project is user-driven: three pilot projects within operational areas relevant to the industrial partners will provide the context for all implementation and evaluation activities, ensuring that the tools and methodologies delivered by the project are both useful and usable. The project's results will be exploited through the european-wide ties of all partners in the areas of aerospace, engineering, power generation, and distance education.

Publication(s):

EU ESPRIT Proposal for the thematic call "IT in Learning and Training in Industry", project duration 1998/1999.
 
KMi Publications
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.