News Story

KMi lands first OU Framework V Contract

John Domingue, Tuesday 4 Jan 2000

KMi’s Enrico Motta has landed the Open University’s first EU Framework V contract. The contract, which awards 207K Euros (£130K) to KMi over a three-year period, is for IBROW: An Intelligent Brokering Service for Knowledge-Component Reuse on the World-Wide Web.
The aim of the IBROW project is to develop an intelligent software broker which will perform specialized search over the World-Wide-Web to analyse the contents of libraries of software components and identify those relevant to an application. In a typical IBROW scenario, a user logs on to the IBROW server on the World-Wide-Web and enters the specification of the knowledge-intensive problem he or she wants to solve. For instance, this could be a classification problem. The broker will then examine the available libraries of software components and configure a suitable problem solver for the problem in question.
In the envisaged scenario digital libraries are viewed as active, competence-based components that encapsulate reasoning services, such as configurable information filters, automatic classifiers and design problem solvers. The IBROW software broker relies on shared ontologies to support such component reuse.
The IBROW consortium consists of seven partners, which include four European universities, one public research organization, an company specializing in Internet applications and Stanford University (USA). An industrial advisory board consisting of five members from three European countries and one from Japan oversees the scientific directions in an economic context.
Relevant links