News Story

DIP: a 16M Euro Flagship Semantic Web Services Project

John Domingue, Friday 27 Oct 2006

Yesterday saw the conclusion to DIP, the 3-year 16M Euro Integrated Project on Semantic Web Services with the final review. According to the project funders, the EU commission, the endeavour has been an outstanding success. Concluding the final review the EU Project Officer Kai Tullius stated: “DIP is a flagship project which will serve as an example to other large projects within the European Union”. The three DIP reviewers were also full of praise, thanking the consortium for their scientific and technical excellence, commitment, team-work and cohesiveness around a shared vision. As a leading Semantic Web research lab KMi played a leading role within DIP. The Scientific Director of DIP was John Domingue, a KMi Deputy Director. Additionally, KMi’s work within DIP was singled out for high praise at each review. This work was carried out by five KMi Research Fellows: Liliana Cabral, Stefania Galizia, Alessio Gugliotta, Barry Norton, and Carlos Pedrinaci; and Vlad Tanasescu a KMi PhD student. The research topic for DIP was Semantic Web Services, which uses Semantic Web technology to automate all aspects of application development from online Web Services, and a significant proportion of the DIP work was carried out on KMi’s Semantic Web Services platform IRS-III. DIP has had a significant impact on Semantic Web research. A number of new EU projects, with a combined budget of over £50 million, are founded upon the DIP conceptual framework, the DIP architecture and the suite of DIP tools. KMi has three of these new projects: SUPER, LUISA and the Living Human Digital Library, which will apply DIP in the areas of Business Process Modelling, eLearning and Bioinformatics respectively. Thus far the DIP project has produced 200 publications including 4 books with many more expected over the next year. DIP has also had an impact on Semantic Web and Web Services standards. DIP results are currently being standardised through W3C’s Working Group on a Rule Interchange Format, Semantic Annotations of WSDL Working Group, and within the OASIS Semantic Execution Environment Technical Committee chaired by John Domingue.