News Story

The AKT begins…..KMI awarded £1.2M by EPSRC

Enrico Motta, Wednesday 1 Mar 2000

KMi has been awarded 1.2M by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to carry out research in the application of knowledge technologies to support knowledge creation and sharing in organizations. This highly prestigious award has been obtained in the context of the EPSRC Programme on Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations centred on Information Technology.The project is called AKT: Advanced Knowledge Technologies and has a total budget of almost 7M. It will be carried out by a consortium comprising 5 universities and backed by over 20 industrial, commercial and governmental organizations. The academic partners are:

University of Southampton (Electronics and Computer Science) – Coordinator
University of Edinburgh (Division of Informatics)
University of Sheffield (Computer Science)
University of Aberdeen (Computer Science)
The Open University (Knowledge Media Institute)

The consortium plans to tackle fundamental and applied problems associated with the acquisition, modelling, reuse, retrieval, publishing and maintenance of knowledge, with the aim of achieving a quantum leap in knowledge technologies, both within specific disciplines, say knowledge acquisition or information extraction, and within the intelligent systems area as a whole. According to a recent estimate presented to the World Economic Forum in Davos, the market for intelligent retrieval and analysis of information stored in companies’ repositories and on the World-Wide Web could amount to $4 trillion a year within the next 15 years. The proposed IRC will provide timely, exciting and necessary support to the growth of the knowledge economy.
Relevant links
KMi’s Knowledge Modelling Pages
Enrico Motta’s home page
EPSRC’s home page