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OpenKnowledge
OpenKnowledge provided a novel form of peer to peer knowledge sharing in open environments, using interaction model routing; context maintenance; dynamic ontology matching and visualisation to avoid scaling problems found in traditional systems. We applied our methods to problems in bioinformatics and emergency response, with further applications in biomedicine on the horizon.
Impact
We looked to 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 has been that of demonstrating that by shifting the emphasis to interaction (the details of which may be hidden from users) it is possible to obtain knowledge sharing of sufficient quality for sustainable communities of practice without the barrier of complex meta-data provision prior to community formation.
Main innovation
The existing, open Worldwide Web has been successful on a global scale because the cost of participation at a basic level is low and the individual benefit of participation is immediate, rising rapidly as more participants take part. The same cannot currently be said about semantic based systems because the cost of being precise about semantics for sophisticated components is prohibitively high and the cost of ensuring an individual, absolute semantics for a component rises rapidly as more participants take part. OpenKnowledge aimed to break out of this deadlock by focusing on semantics related to interaction (which have been 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.
Our efforts have been concentrated on providing 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 has been to demonstrate that by shifting the emphasis to interaction (the details of which may be hidden from users) it is possible to obtain knowledge sharing of sufficient quality for sustainable communities of practise without the barrier of complex meta-data provision prior to community formation. We grounded our research in two testbed arenas: bioinformatics and emergency response.
Results
- Definition of an interaction modelling language.
- A working prototype has been produced that accommodates the key elements for an OpenKnowledge kernel system: interaction model construction and interpretation; peer to peer discovery and routing; visualisation; service invocation.
- Scenarios have been established in bioinformatics and emergency response, with the bioinformations research already producing a new scientific result for yeast protein biologists.
- Initial specifications have been produced for:
- Dynamic ontology mapping
- Good enough answer and trust analysis
- Visualisation
More details
- OpenKnowledge overview (PDF, 1.943KB)
- OpenKnowledge Manual. What is OpenKnowledge?
- Annual Report 2008 (PDF, 53KB)
- Annual Report 2007 (PDF, 390KB)
- Annual Report 2006 (PDF, 340KB)
- EL PAÍS article: "Hacia una 'web' que entienda al usuario" (Spanish, 22 February 2006)
- IST Results News in Brief: Semantics in a cheaper meaning (25 January 2006)
- OpenKnowledge Project website.
Administrative Details
- OpenKnowledge is a specific targeted research project of the European Union's 6th Framework Programme - call 4.
- OpenKnowledge started on 1 April 2006 and finished on 31 December 2008.
- Six partners from four countries have been involved in the project.
List of Participants
- School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK
- School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK
- Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK
- Department of Information and Communication Technology, University of Trento, Italy
- Faculty of Sciences, Free University, Amsterdam
- Artificial Intelligence Research Insitute, University of Barcelona, Spain
Contact Persons
- Project co-ordinator: David Robertson
- THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
- Via the OpenKnowledge website you will find other People in the Project.
Events in connection with OpenKnowledge
- ESWC Conference
- 11-14 June 2006
- Budva, Montenegro
- AAAI Conference
- 16-20 July 2006
- Boston, USA
- ISWC 2006
- July 2006
- Athens, GA, USA
- The OpenKnowledge project presented the paper: PowerMap: Mapping the Real Semantic Web on the Fly (PDF, 201KB)
- WWW 2007
- 8-12 May 2007
- Banff, Alberta, USA
- Paper submitted: Web Service Composition via Semantic Matching of Interaction Specifications
- ESWC 2007
- 3-7 June 2007
- Innsbruck, Austria
- Paper submitted: A Large Scale Dataset for the Evaluation of Matching Systems