Project Summary
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 aims to break out of this deadlock 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.
We shall 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 practise without the barrier of complex meta-data provision prior to community formation. We ground our research in two testbed arenas: bioinformatics and emergency response.
OpenKnowledge is due to start officially as a funded project in January 2006, at which point it will connect researchers in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Edinburgh, Open University, Southampton and Trento. Its coordinator is Dave Robertson .
Project Objectives
- What : A new form of open, coordinated knowledge sharing architecture.
- Why : To make semantic web communities of practise easier to form and join without pre-engineering.
- For whom : For everyone but validated in bioinformatics and GIS emergency monitoring and management testbeds.
- By whom : Six major European sites and their scientific/industrial partners, including W3C involvement.
People Currently Involved
- Joaquin Abian
- Jaume Agustí
- Manuel Atencia Arcas
- Tim Berners Lee
- Matteo Bonifacio
- Alan Bundy
- Srinandan Dasmahapatra
- Dietlind Gerloff
- Fausto Giunchiglia
- Frank van Harmelen
- Sindhu Joseph
- Paul Lewis
- Fiona McNeil
- Maurizio Marchese
- Enrico Motta
- Adrián Perreau de Pinninck Bas
- Dave Robertson
- Marco Schorlemmer
- Nigel Shadbolt
- Rony Siebes
- Carles Sierra
- Austin Tate
- Chris Walton
- Ilya Zaihrayeu