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Large Scale Knowledge Sharing and Reuse across Media
X-Media addresses the issue of knowledge management in complex distributed environments. It studies, develops and implements large scale methodologies and techniques for knowledge management able to support sharing and reuse of knowledge that is distributed in different media (images, documents and data) and repositories (data bases, knowledge bases, document repositories, etc.).
Impact
X-media will develop technologies that are expected to increase significantly the degree and quality of Knowledge Management. In concrete terms, the project will produce a set of component technologies for single and cross-media knowledge acquisition working on texts, data and images, a methodology and component modules for representing dynamic and uncertain knowledge in standards such as RDF, OWL, a set of technologies for knowledge presentation and process support. The abovementioned modules will be integrated and inserted in a generic architecture that will be made available in the form of the reference kernel implementation. This implementation will be:
- A working example and bootstrapping environment for application developers, to be used to build applications within the project
- An integrated reference sharing environment to be used for dissemination and demonstration activities.
The kernel implementation will be made available in the form of open source in order to enable its use outside the consortium.
Finally, the project will produce two applications in key industrial sectors that will work as showcases for the technology and will demonstrate the viability of the X-Media approach in real environments. It is possible that other applications and showcases will be defined by the industrial partners for other fields and/or for specific customers.
The technology is expected both to reduce the cost of knowledge identification and extraction and to enable new forms of Knowledge Management that are currently too expensive to be implemented. Project results will be amply disseminated following a well-defined dissemination and exploitation plan. The industrial partners will set up exploitation plans with the goal of applying X-Media based knowledge management technologies at customer's sites by using applications and pilot systems developed in the project. An industrial board has been set up with members drawn from complementary industries with interests in the field of cross media knowledge sharing, in order to provide feedback on the exploitability and usability of proposed techniques - thus steering the project consortium in a direction that might be useful for industrial board participants (as users of the technology), as well as for the project consortium as developers and exploiters of such technology. The industrial board it is expected to be a major target for exploitation of project results.
A significant part of the software will be made available to the international community as open source so as to foster reuse and further research.
Main innovation
X-Media studies, designs and develops:
- Effective and efficient new paradigms for knowledge retrieval, sharing and reuse which enable users to define and parameterize views on the available knowledge according to their needs. Users will be supported by an anticipatory system able to trace automatically the user profile and help focusing in the large search space.
- Novel and cutting-edge knowledge fusion methods to support knowledge workers in making decisions when confronted with - possibly contradicting - knowledge derived from different resources.
- Techniques able to represent and manage (i) uncertainty, (ii) trust and provenance as well as (iii) dynamic aspects of knowledge, in order to help users balancing their judgment;
- Robust and scalable knowledge acquisition and data analysis tools operating across media boundaries (text, images and data) to automatically cross-relate and annotate text and images with metadata for easier sharing and retrieval as well as fostering integration with other resources
- A methodology and a technical infrastructure able to deliver knowledge from across media to the knowledge workers, taking into account the complexity of managing different media with different size of data.
- A generic and flexible architecture allowing end users to easily customize it and integrate it with their KM practices or needs as well as a mainly open source reference implementation and libraries which technology providing companies can reuse.
All the methodologies aim at seamlessly integrating with current work practices. Usability will be a major concern together with ease of customisation for new applications. Technologies will be able to support knowledge workers in an effective way,
(i) hiding the complexity of the underlying search/retrieval process,
(ii) resulting in a natural access to knowledge,
(iii) allowing interoperability between heterogeneous information resources and
(iv) including heterogeneity of data type (data, image, texts).
More details
- Flyer (PDF, 5.218KB)
- Annual Report 2008 (PDF, 210KB)
- Annual Report 2007 (PDF, 15MB)
- Annual Report 2006 (PDF, 1.604KB)
- X-MEDIA website
Administrative Details
- X-Media is an Integrated Project (IP), financed by the 6th Framework Programme of the EU, contract number FP6-26978.
- The project started on 1 March 2006 and will finish on 28 February 2010.
- The budget is 13.2 million euros, with the European Commission providing a 9.9 million euros grant.
- 15 partners from 7 European countries are involved in the project.
Participants
The consortium is composed of research institutions and industrial partners of international standing. Research partners are specialists in Semantic Web Technologies, Knowledge Management, Information Extraction from text, Image Understanding, Data Mining, Document Enrichment and Knowledge Sharing.
Academic institutions:
- University of Sheffield (coordinator, UK),
- University of Koblenz (D),
- ITC-Irst (I),
- University of Ljubljana (Slovenia)
- University of Freiburg (D),
- CERTH (G),
- Labri (F),
- University of Karlsruhe (D)
- Open University (UK).
The role of academic partners is to define high quality research with a precise exploitation and application pattern, mixing basic long term research with shorter term research, application and experimentation.
Technology providers in the project are:
Their role is studying, designing and implementing the infrastructure supporting the knowledge management methodology and to support research and application.
End users are:
- Rolls Royce (UK)
- Centro Ricerche Fiat (I).
Their role will be to provide requirements and testbeds for the knowledge management technology.
Contacts
To reach the project coordinators, use this Contact Form
Project Director:
Professor Fabio Ciravegna
Intelligent Web Technologies lab, Natural Language Processing group, Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield - Website
Administrative coordinator:
Ms Lucy Lally
Natural Language Processing group, Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield - Website