News Story

KMi alone covers a quarter of IST FP6 Showcase

John Domingue, Monday 17 Dec 2007

Knowledge Media Institute was honoured to be included among a handful of leading European institutes invited to the Framework 6 (FP6) Showcase Event, which took place on 12-13 December in Luxembourg. Out of eight invitations, two went directly to projects headed by KMi researchers: John Domingue (Scientific Director of the SUPER project) and Martin Dzbor (Technical Manager of the NeOn project). In addition, KMi is participating in another showcased project, X-Media (led and presented by Prof. Fabio Ciravegna from University of Sheffield). Thus, the overall presence of KMi research amounted to three out of eight showcases in total, or, three out of five in the area of knowledge technologies! The FP6 Showcase was a kick-off to a two-day workshop titled "FP7: Call 3 in Motion". The aim of the workshop was to provide information and networking opportunities for the research and industrial communities considering submitting a proposal under the 3rd call. More than 350 participants came to attend the FP6 showcases, presentations of selected Call 1 projects, as well as preliminary discussions about possible research directions beyond 2008 were held to offer a more rounded picture of the research in the ‘Knowledge and Content’ Unit. The showcase, chaired by Stefano Bertolo (a Project Officer from the Knowledge and Content Unit) was started by Martin Dzbor giving a talk on motivating research into infrastructural and engineering aspects of the Semantic Web. Martin then illustrated some of the solutions investigated in the NeOn project and how they relate to broader needs of a knowledge-based economy. In particular, he showed the NeOn Toolkit for engineering networked ontologies and parts of the NeOn infrastructure (incl. Watson, the Semantic Web analysis and search engine, Oyster, the peer to peer ontology publishing framework, and the alignment server/API for reconciling different ontological perspectives). John Domingue then concluded the session with a talk on business practice meeting the latest developments in Semantic Web Services. In particular he touched on the need to bridge the gap between the language of business practitioners and the IT staff, and illustrated the solutions to this gap investigated by the SUPER project, which included the transformations of business process models into semantic web service description, automated service composition, and more. SUPER and NeOn are two primary research undertakings of KMi within the Framework 6 research agenda. Both are integrated projects involving some of Europe’s leading institutions and corporations, for example, SAP AG in SUPER, or Software AG and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in the NeOn project.