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UKOLN was a partner in DELOS, a major initiative funded by the EU FP6 Programme.

Knowledge Extraction & Semantic Interoperability (KESI) (WP5)

Cluster description

The thematic area of Semantic Interoperability is growing in importance in digital library (DL) research (taking the interpretation of "digital library" at its broadest). It applies to the application of different vocabularies and terminology used in descriptions of digital objects for both learning and research, collections of those objects, collections of datasets and resources used in the wider cultural heritage sector and in e-research. Indeed, cross-sectoral and cross-domain shared understanding of semantic descriptions is one of the goals of the Semantic Web as envisaged by Tim Berners-Lee in his "roadmap" published in 1998.

This vision has more recently (2001) been applied to "Grid computing" and e-science/e-research initiatives in the Semantic Grid approach. In addition, the application of algorithms for the mining and analysis of digital resources (text, data, complex objects), offers exciting opportunities for the extraction of new knowledge and the re-use of data and information in new ways. Today, we are beginning to address some of the issues and challenges in this complex area and the Delos Network of Excellence has the opportunity to carry out some important research to move the Semantic Web/Grid vision forwards towards implementation.

Joint Programme of Activities 3

Strategic Objectives

The cluster has continued to build on the earlier foundation work and during JPA2 (January - December 2005) has made significant progress in the two task areas of Interoperability of eLearning applications with Digital Libraries and Ontology-driven Interoperability. Work on the third task area (Digital Repositories) has been progressing more slowly and will be completed during the next six months.

Over the next 18 months (January 2006-) we will pursue the following strategic goals:

To build links between the digital repository work and the digital library reference model developments.
To work more closely with e-Learning and cultural heritage user communities in the design, testing, evaluation and enhancement of the prototype systems and to facilitate their integration with the Delos Digital Library.
To extend the functionality of the GraphOnto tool and promote its application and use in other Delos research tasks as an exemplar of integration within the Network.
To investigate and develop methods and a demonstrator for the integration of heterogeneous data types, models, upper level ontologies and domain specific KOS.