OpenKnowledge

Open Architecture for Coordinated Knowledge Sharing

OpenKnowledge is a 3 year long STReP project financed under the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme. The goal of the project is to decrease the cost of participation in semantic based systems that are increasingly developed in the context of the Semantic Web.This will be achieved by focusing on semantics related to interaction (which are acquired at low cost during participation) and using this to avoid dependency on a priori semantic agreement; instead making semantic commitments incrementally at run time. The "Open" in OpenKnowledge thus is significant in two senses: it assumes an open system, which anyone may join at any time; it assumes an openness to being joined, achieved through participation at low individual cost.

The project will provide a unifying framework based on interaction models that are mobile in the sense that they may be transferred to other components, this being a mechanism for Web service composition and for coalition formation. A key contribution of OpenKnowledge is to demonstrate that by shifting the emphasis to interaction (the details of which may be hidden from users) we can obtain knowledge sharing of sufficient quality for sustainable communities of practice without the barrier of complex meta-data provision prior to community formation. This requires us to re-interpret forms of contextual reasoning, ontology mapping, query routing and visualisation for this new arena. We ground our research in two testbed areas: bioinformatics and emergency response. The role of KMI is to evaluate whether the technology developed in the project can be successfully reused to (re-)implement two of its Semantic Web tools, AquaLog and Magpie.

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