Project Overview
This
project seeks to permit and help the represention or structuration of any
kind (and significant amount) of information in a formal or semi-formal way,
manually or semi-automatically, and then its retrieval and comparison.
To that end, the private or shared knowledge server WebKB has been designed
and is usable at www.webkb.org.
It distinguishes itself from other ontology/knowledge servers by its
expressive and intuitive notations, and by permitting Web users to update a
large knowledge base, without lexical/semantic conflicts nor redundancies, and
without forcing the users to agree with each other. It is also one of
the rare knowledge base systems to exploit a natural language ontology
and generate cascading forms to ease and normalize knowledge entering.
Small applications have been built and plans to partially automatize
knowledge acquisition via a natural language parser have begun.
Project Highlights
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Documentation of the integration, correction and extension of the
natural language ontology WordNet and various top-level ontologies,
to form the default ontology of WebKB, and
publication of this work
at ICCS 2003 (11th International Conference on Conceptual Structures) in July.
The application of this ontology and WebKB to the Semantic Web was also
published in January
as a chapter of a book titled "Web Intelligence".
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An application of WebKB to "locate and
compare short-term accommodations on the Sunshine Coast" was built and
demonstrated to the accommodation on-line brokerer Wotif.
Work will continue on this application.
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The WebKB-2 model, notations, ontology and knowledge representation
recommendations is taken as
the basis to answer an
"Ontology Definition Metamodel RFP" from the Object Management Group (OMG)
in order to extend UML for knowledge representation purposes. This work is
done in cooperation with Kerry Raymond (DSTC) and Bob Colomb (UQ). The
proposal will be submitted in August 2003.
Project Plans
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Continue developping WebKB (import/export parsers, knowledge inferencing and
sharing techniques, etc.) and reference applications for it.
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Continue looking for its licensing or its commercial application.