judith meskill - soc.media.rocks

An eMediaWire press release announces--Europe's semantic web projects start to mesh.
Galway, Ireland (PRWEB) May 23 2004 - An international audience of over 220 semantic web specialists and enthusiasts from Europe, USA, Australia and Japan attended the 1st European Semantic Web Symposium (ESWS 2004) on 10-12 May in Heraklion, Crete.
ESWS 2004, which featured academic research papers, industrial papers, tutorials, posters and demonstrations, also showcased three major EU-funded semantic web projects - SEKT (Semantic Knowledge Technologies), DIP (Data, Information and Process Integration), and KnowledgeWeb. These projects form part of a natural "cluster" collectively referred to as SDK.
 
...SEKT (SEmantic Knowledge Technologies), another of the EU-funded projects featured at ESWS, is coordinated by BT the UK telecoms operator and a leader in the information communication technology market. Dr. John Davies, the SEKT project director said: "The World Wide Web today is full of unstructured text. That's fine for people, but useless for computers. In this scenario, the computer isn't actually doing much computation - it is really a presentation device. The Semantic Web will make web-based information machine-processable - a key area of research in SEKT. SEKT envisions knowledge workplaces where the boundaries between heterogeneous data sources are broken down, and where knowledge management is fully integrated into day-to-day business tasks. Appropriate knowledge will be automatically delivered to the right people at the right time at the right granularity via a range of user devices."
 
Professor Rudi Studer from the University of Karlsruhe, SEKT's Technical Director, explained that the project will integrate 3 key Semantic Web technologies: "The synergy between human language technology, machine learning techniques as well as ontology management methods will be exploited in order to generate in a semi-automatic way the ontological structures and related metadata that are needed for realizing Next Generation Knowledge Management solutions". The end result will be to enable greater productivity for knowledge workers across a wide range of professional disciplines and industrial sectors.
 
KnowledgeWeb, the third project in the trio of semantic web projects, is also funded by the Information Society Technologies (IST) Priority for Research, Technology Development & Demonstration under the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission. The mission of KnowledgeWeb is to strengthen European industry and service providers in one of the most important areas of current computer technology: semantic web enabled e-work and e-commerce. The KnowledgeWeb network of excellence will focus effort around the outreach of semantic web technology to industry, education and research in order to ensure critical mass, maximum impact and full support from industry...