VIKEF Virtual Information and Knowledge Environment Framework
Effective acquisition, organisation, processing, sharing, and use of the knowledge embedded in multimedia content as well as in information- and knowledge-based work processes plays a major role for competitiveness in the modern information society and for the emerging knowledge economy. ,However, this wealth of knowledge implicitly conveyed in the vast amount of available digital content is nowadays only accessible, if considerable manual effort has been invested into its interpretation and semantic annotation, which is possible only for a small fraction of the available content. Therefore the major part of the implicit semantic knowledge is not taken into account by state-of-the-art information access technologies like search engines, which restrict their indexing activities to superficial levels, mostly the keyword level., ,The R&D efforts in VIKEF are focused on bridging the gap between the partly implicit knowledge and information conveyed in scientific and business content resources produced by humans (e.g. text, speech, images), on the one hand, and the explicit representation of knowledge required for a targeted and effective access, dissemination, sharing, use, and annotation of information, content, and knowledge resources (ICK resources) by scientific and business communities and their information- and knowledge-based work processes, on the other hand. The project is dedicated to advanced semantic-enabled support for ICK production, acquisition, processing, annotation, sharing and use by empowering information and knowledge environments. The VIKEF Big Picture,This is achieved by combining R&D excellence in the area of ICK resource acquisition, semi-automatic opening up and semantic annotation of textual and multimedia documents, semantic representation and interoperability, personalization and collaboration support, and information visualisation into a multidisciplinary consortium. The VIKEF project activities cover foundational research, component-level research and development, as well as system-level integration. The VIKEF R&D results are integrated into a flexible software framework, the VIKE-Framework. The framework functionality is revolving around the opening up and semantic annotation of scientific and business multimedia content and the effective reuse of such annotations for value-adding community services and enhanced visual access, which reduce information overload, improve collaboration, and foster smart access, targeted dissemination, effective sharing and use of ICK resources. The overall outputs foreseen for the Project are:,· An advanced software framework for semantic-based Information, Content, and Knowledge management systems and intelligent services supporting virtual information and knowledge environments.,· An exemplary sectoral application solution based on this framework providing semantic-enabled community services for the scientific and for the business domain.,In more detail, the VIKEF R&D activities will be focussed in the following areas:,· Supporting the acquisition of scientific and business ICK resources (including multimedia resources and live presentations) as well as their Harmonization and Management ,· Supporting the semantic annotation of image, video, and multimedia documents by semi-automatic analysis and semantic extraction taking into account the specific characteristics of different media types and context knowledge focusing the ,· Supporting semantic representation as well as interoperability and integration of heterogeneous semantic annotations and knowledge objects like taxonomies, ontologies etc. as it is required in distributed open virtual information and knowledge environments.,· Supporting the collaborative processing and reuse of semantic annotations and knowledge about users and user groups for context-aware interpretation, dissemination and visualization of ICK resources as well as for the development of innovative value adding services.,· Integration of the contributions in the different R&D areas into one framework supporting entire knowledge value chain applications ,· A sustainable support of evolution in content, ontologies, community, and system requirements,· A series of system demonstrators and trials targeted towards crystallization application domains, trade fairs and scientific congresses domain validating the VIKEF approach in real knowledge value chain applications,The long term vision laying behind the Project is that the VIKEF open and flexible framework will provide a wide spectrum of actors with a robust architecture and a software development environment for the rapid, flexible and customized development of semantic-enabled virtual information and knowledge environments for communities in different application domains.VIKEF Project Partners,? INMARK Estudios y Estrategias, S.A,? Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Forderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. - FhG/IPSI ,? Xerox - The Document Company SAS - Xerox ,? Istituto Trentino di Cultura (ITC-irst),? Telefonica Investigacion y Desarrollo Sociedad Anonima Unipersonal - TID,? University of Trento UniTN,? Universita degli Studi di Bari - Dipartimento di Informatica - UNIBA,? University of Sheffield USFD ,? Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale - CNR-ILC,? The National Microelectronics Applications Centre Ltd MAC,? finebrain.com Ltd. finebrain,? Cyberlab.Org,? CPO Hanser,? Fundacion Semana Verde de Galicia,