EU funded project delivers cutting edge knowledge management tool
The completion of an EU funded project has led to the creation of a suite of state of the art ontology-based knowledge management tools. The 'on-to-knowledge' project brought together research and academic institutes, along with leading companies, from the Netherlands, the UK, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, and Norway. The initiative received 1.3 million euro of EU funding under the information society technologies subsection of the Fifth Framework Programme. Ontologies are the rules governing how information is structured, which in turn allow that information to be processed by automatic computers. As one of the project coordinators, Frank van Harmelen, Professor of knowledge representation at the Free University of Amsterdam, explained to CORDIS News: 'Without a defined [ontology], if an employee searchers for a 'sales presentation', he or she might get an unacceptably large set of results. An [ontology] lets the same user search for a 'sales presentation' within a specific category, such as customer x or suppliers, returning a smaller and more relevant set of results.' The technology should also have an impact on Internet users, as ontologies are also used to represent the meaning and content of information on the web, and with well over a billion pages currently online and rising daily, effective means of searching and retrieving data will become ever more important. Indeed, one of the aims of the on-to-knowledge project was to identify an ontology language standard for the Internet that could be adopted by the Worldwide Web consortium, bringing the next generation web - the semantic web - a step closer. Effective knowledge management has been identified as a key to ensuring the competitiveness of Europe's enterprises, and the project consortium hopes that their tools and methodology will contribute to achieving this aim. Other objectives for the team included delivering a product that would lower the cost of retrieving timely and specific information, and also addressing users with varying levels of technical ability by hiding complex technology behind user-friendly interfaces. The project was completed in September, and since then the team have been busy disseminating the results of their work in a variety of ways, and have already released a large number of publications.