Town Meeting Aims Introduce the project and partners Present our baseline technologies Outline current and planned work Understand your perspectives on knowledge technolgies Re examine AKTs assumptions Instigate the AKTors Club Lay foundation for future possible future collaboration

The AKT Script The background The AKTors The context The challenges The assumptions The technologies The testbeds The AKTors Club

History of the bid EPSRC competition for computer-centric IRCs announced Outline bid submitted May 1999 Full bid submitted Nov 1999 – 12:120 London presentation Jan 2000 Awarded April 2000 – 4:12 Official start Oct 2000 for 6 years Full amount awarded - £ 7.5 million

The AKTors The Universities of Southampton (ECS), Aberdeen (CS), Edinburgh (CIS/AIAI), Sheffield (CS), the Open University (KMI) Around 36 investigators and reseach staff

AKT: The story so far AKT 0 infrastructure built 1 st Technical Workshop Jan 01 2 nd Technical Workshop June 01 1 st Town Meeting London

Context: Definitions Data – raw uninterpreted bits, bytes and signals Information – data equipped with meaning Knowledge – information applied to achieve a goal, effect an action, make a decision

Context: The Problem We are drowning in information and starving for knowledge Infosmog: The condition of having too much information to be able to take effective action or make an informed decision The deluge of data is overwhelming

Context: Aspirations getting the right information, to the right person/system, in the right form at the right time – the provision of knowledge services turning information into knowledge in some cases turning data into enriched, annotated information supporting the knowledge life-cycle

Context : Supporting the Knowledge Life Cycle

Challenges: Acquisition Diversity of sources Distributed nature Problems of scale Acquisition rationale and annotation Incidental KA is the Holy Grail

Challenges: Modelling What to model? How to model? How enriched? How personalised?

Challenges in the K Life Cycle: Retrieval Retrieval paradigms Framing queries Scope and extent of search Nature of search

Challenges in the K Life Cycle: Reuse What does reuse mean What can be reused How to identify reuse options How to model/capture for reuse

Challenges in the K Life Cycle: Publishing Dynamic document/content construction Richly linked content Integrating authoring, reviewing and presentation Personalised presentation

Challenges in the K Life Cycle: Maintainance How to capture and model for maintenance? What model of custodianship? Change control, certification and re- certification Decommissioning

Challenges to the IRC Reconciling short, medium and long term Achieving practical relevance Maintaining quality over 6 years Daring to be off the wall

Assumptions: AKT is interdisciplinary Knowledge Engineering WWW technology and standards Multimedia Information Systems Natural Language Processing Agent Based Computing

Assumptions: AKT meets Semantic Web

Assumptions: AKT and Ontologies Shared understanding or conceptualisation set of concepts (e.g. entities, attributes, processes), their definitions and inter- relationships Facilitate communication Normative models… Inter-operability: Sharing & Reuse Inter-lingua…

Assumptions: AKT aims to provide Knowledge Services on the Semantic Web Content with extensive meta {data,information,knowledge} Services that exploit this enriched content

AKT: KM and K Technology Technology crucial to meet the challenges Technology not 100% of the solution Technology to be usable by diverse organisations need to understand requirements should not provide monolithic system Aim to be a research locus for technologies to support knowledge services

Example work to date Tools and methods to develop, build and maintain ontologies Services for content annotation Investigating web based inference engines Integration of link services Characterisation of ABus Agents as knowledge services Multimedia KA Knowledge valuation

Challenges Test Beds AKT – Scientific KM Rolls Royce Aerospace – Supporting Design, Enriching objects Unilever – Knowledge Auditing UK E-Science – Grid Initiative

Definition of AKTors Club Players Those companies who are displaying an active interest in AKT. A named contact from each company would have a named contact from the AKT consortium. Each Player would be asked to produce a web page, which should be updated each year in order to remain on the Players' list. "Audience" Those companies who have expressed an interest in AKT but are not considered as being "active" (ie have not produced a web page). An annual Town Meeting will be held for the AKTors Club.