Section: Overall Objectives

Introduction

Context and Objectives

Actors and interaction devices are becoming more and more mobile while knowledge sources, services and their networks are becoming ubiquitous. In this context we witness the emergence of communities of interest and/or practice, very light and agile structures that can be ephemeral and virtual. To assist the life-cycle of such communities we are interested in providing tools and methodologies supporting the interactions and the memories of these focused groups. Throughout its life time, a community uses, produces, exchanges, and shares resources materializing knowledge through various types of documents (that may be structured or not, textual, multimedia, etc.). A community may also rely on some services or programs available inside the community or outside. To ensure mutual understanding between community members, the exchanges inside a community rely on a common terminology and common concepts that may evolve throughout the life of the community. These exchanges can also use various media.

The context of the emergence of such virtual communities (inside organizations, across organizations or independently of any organization) is the use of the Web not only for information sharing but also for support to cooperation, the use of new interaction channels, the evolution of Web technologies (Semantic Web, social Web, Web services, mobile Web, ubiquitous Web).

Edelweiss aims at offering models, methods and techniques for supporting ergonomic, web-based, knowledge management and collaboration in virtual communities interacting with information resources through the Web. Edelweiss will thus perform research on graph-based, ontology-based, web-based knowledge representation and inferences for interacting with or through information resources.

Research Topics

The support to such a virtual community can be studied according to several viewpoints:

• The activities of the community consist of structuring, searching, retrieving, reusing, and composing the community internal or external resources / services. A support to these activities can be offered through a semantic-web-based approach, by processing annotations of such resources / services;

• Conceptual modelling of the interactions and collaboration among community members mediated by tools could enable us to propose ergonomic tools adapted to support such collaboration;

• To achieve the development of such supporting tools and methodologies, basic blocks are needed to represent knowledge and to reason and perform inferences on this representation: we choose to rely on a graph-based representation.

Therefore, we will study thoroughly three complementary research directions, corresponding to these three viewpoints:

• Research direction 1: Annotation of Information Resources

• Research direction 2: Interaction Design

• Research direction 3: Knowledge Graph-based Representation.

Our research topics can be decomposed as follows:

• Semantic Annotation of Information Resources

  • Ontology-guided annotation process

  • Semi-automatic generation of annotations from texts

  • Contextualization, Evolution, Heterogeneity of annotations

  • Reflective annotations and meta-annotations

  • Design and development of an Annotation toolkit

• Interaction Design of Semantic Systems

  • Supporting Human Interoperability in Semantic Activities through Articulating Functionalities and in Scenario Management Activities

  • Experimental evaluation of inferences for information retrieval and other tasks

  • Ontology-based intelligent interfaces

  • Interaction platform

• Knowledge-Graph-based Representation of the Semantic Web Knowledge

  • Semantic Factory and Knowledge Graph Toolkit

  • Scaling graph representations and operations

  • Ontology-based Model Driven Engineering

  • Inferences characteristic to graphs

  • Inferences characteristic to distributed Web sources.

International and industrial relations

We collaborate or collaborated with industrialists in the following fields: aeronautics (Aerospace, Dassault-Aviation, EADS), car industry (Renault, ItalDesign), telecommunications (CSELT, T-NOVA, Telecom Valley, France Telecom), service integration (Atos Origin), semi-conductors (Philips Semi-Conductors, now NXP), manufacturing (Estanda) and earth sciences (BRGM, IFP), and in biology (IPMC, Immunosearch). We also had collaborations with researchers in accidentology (INRETS) and in the field of healthcare (Nautilus), in civil engineering sector (CSTB)and in software engineering (ILOG). We had international relations with Griffith University and CSIRO (Australia), Parma University (Italia), and T-Systems Nova (Germany).

Our work was applied in the context of the IST project CoMMA and we took part in the OntoWeb thematic network. We take part in the Knowledge Web Network of Excellence, in the Integrated Project Palette and in the STREPS projects SeaLife and SevenPro.