About KMi
Wordle: KMi.open.ac.uk
The Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) was set up in 1995 in recognition of the need for the Open University to be at the forefront of research and development in a convergence of areas that impacted on the OU's very nature: Cognitive and Learning Sciences, Artificial Intelligence and Semantic Technologies, and Multimedia. We chose to call this convergence Knowledge Media.

Knowledge Media is about the processes of generating, understanding and sharing knowledge using several different media, as well as understanding how the use of different media shape these processes.

KMi operates with reference to a number of basic tenets, which define the context in which we formulate and pursue our research objectives:

Strategic Threads

Our research is aligned with a number of broad strategic threads, currently Future Internet, Knowledge Management, Multimedia & Information Systems, Narrative Hypermedia, New Media Systems, Semantic Web & Knowledge Services and Social Software.

Learning

In keeping with a lifelong learning perspective, our research agenda takes a broad definition of learning, embracing distance learning, learning in the classroom, and learning in the workplace.



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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.