KnowledgeWeb

The current World Wide Web (WWW) is, by its function, the syntactic web where structure of the content has been presented while the content itself is inaccessible to computers. The next generation of the Web (the Semantic Web) aims to alleviate such problem and provide

specific solutions targeted the concrete problems. The Web resources will be much easier and more readily accessible by both human and computers with the added semantic information in a machine-understandable and machine-processable fashion. It will have much higher impact

on eWork and eCommerce as the current version of the web already had.

Still, there is a long way to go transfer the semantic web from an academic adventure into a technology provided

by software industry. Supporting this transition process of Ontology technology from Academia to Industry is the main and major goal of Knowledge Web. This main goal

naturally translates into three main objectives given the

nature of such a transformation.

(1) Industry requires immediate support in tacking up this complex and new technology. Languages and interfaces need to be standardized to reduce the effort and provide scalability to solutions. Methods and use cases need to be provided to convince and to provide guidelines

for how to work with this technology.

(2) Important support to industry is provided by

developing high-class education in the area of semantic web, web services, and Ontologies.

(3) Research on Ontologies and the semantic web have not yet reached its goals.

New areas such as the combination of semantic web with web services realizing intelligent web services require serious new research efforts. Spoken in a nutshell, it is the mission of Knowledge Web to strengthen the European software industry in one of the most important areas of current computer technology: Semantic web enabled eWork and eCommerce.

Naturally, this includes education and research efforts to ensure the durability of impact and support of industry.

Consortium

University of Innsbruck, Institut für Informatik (DE)

Ecole Polythechnique Federale de Lausanne (FR)

France Telecom (FR)

Freie Universität Berlin (DE)

Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique

Informatics and Telematics Institute (GR)

Learning Lab Lower Saxony

National University of Ireland Galway (IR)

The Open University

Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (ES)

University of Karlsruhe (DE)

University of Liverpool (UK)

University of Manchester (UK)

University of Sheffield (UK)

University of Trento

Vrije Universiteit Netherlands (NL)

Vrije Universiteit Brussel (BE)