DSTC Project Report

Quarter April to June 2003

Project Name: WebKB
Project Title: Knowledge Warehousing and Querying
Contact Researcher: Philippe MARTIN
E-mail: pm .@. phmartin dot info
Phone: +61 7 5552 8923

Project Team:

Researcher	Organisation	% of time on Project
Dr Philippe MARTIN	DSTC	100

1. General description of the research project aims

The line of research of the WebKB project is to permit and help (i) the represention or structuration of any kind (and amount) of information in a formal or semi-formal way, manually or semi-automatically, and (ii) the retrieval and comparison of this represented information.

To that end, a knowledge server called WebKB-2 has been in development since in January 2000, above a free object-oriented database system.
Although many small features still need to be implemented, WebKB-2 and its resources (e.g. notations and ontology) may be considered at the "pilot stage" for the goal of manual "knowledge storage, retrieval and comparison". Many small examples have been built (see http://www.webkb.org/kb/), including a customised application ("locating and comparing short-term accommodations on the Sunshine Coast"). Companies (Wotif, Telstra Research Laboratories) are contacted.
Imports from and exports to notations less adapted to knowledge entering and sharing than WebKB-2 notations but more commonly used (e.g. RDF/OWL, KIF) are at the "exploration stage".
At the idea stage is a tool to (semi-)automatically extract knowledge from general documents. This would be very interesting since, outside customized interfaces, despite WebKB-2 features, manual knowledge representation remains a slow and difficult process.

This second quarter, a good part of the work had for goal the answering of an "Ontology Definition Metamodel RFP" from the Object Management Group (OMG) in order to extend UML for knowledge representation purposes. This work was done in cooperation with Kerry Raymond (DSTC) and Bob Colomb (UQ) and has for basis the WebKB-2 model, notations, ontology and knowledge representation recommendations.

2. Status of the Project

Highlights

1. WebKB-2 and more specifically the "accomodations on the Sunshine Coast" application was presented (i) at the DSTC Demo Day in May, and (ii) to Paul Young, CIO of the accomodation brokering on-line company Wotif. Simplifications of the interface have been done to improve its usability.

2. Several preliminary documents have been created for answering the "Ontology Definition Metamodel RFP". They are accessible at http://www.webkb.org/doc/model/.

New directions

Plans to submit a proposal for the next "Smart Internet CRC" in cooperation with Pr. Abdul Sattar (Griffith Uni.; leader of the "Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Unit") have been abandonned due to recent re-orientations of the goals of this team. However, contacts with other researchers of Griffith Uni revealed new possibilities of cooperations, e.g. on a WordNet-based document retrieval system and a hand-written address recognition system.

Risks and Challenges (including planned mitigation strategy and corrective actions)

Resource Issues

Other Issues

3. Progress in achieving milestones nominated in previous quarterly report or project proposal

4. Future activities and outcomes plan for next quarter

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5. Journal, conference, book chapter or book publications

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6. Summary of collaboration by project staff with other DSTC projects, DSTC participants or third parties

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9. Presentations given by Project Staff

9.1 Presentations to participants:

Project Staff Names and Organisation	Participant Names and Organisation	Title of presentation/demonstration	Date
Philippe MARTIN	Demo Day	Knowledge warehousing with WebKB-2	8/05/2003

Comments (if applicable):

12. Expected Travel for next quarter by Project Staff

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