Objectives

Europe is strongly positioned in the KM systems and applications market. Some European companies have been able to successfully compete over the last years with their American counterparts, and European research organizations are heavily contributing to the development of technology and standards in this field. However, cross-fertilization of European companies and research institutions has yet to be improved, so that research results are incorporated into the next generation of commercial products.

The ONTO-LOGGING project tries to address this issue, bringing together an European leader in the Knowledge Management products market, two complementary industrial partners, two highly experienced research organizations, and one strong end-user corporation.

The problem of corporate ontology formalisation is pretty much an open issue, despite several efforts and advances over the last years. Several research initiatives (OntoKnowledge, SemanticWeb, KnowNet, ...) and standardisation efforts (KQML, KIF, XML derivatives, ...) have taken place, but most of these results have not yet been integrated in current commercial products. As a result of this situation, almost every KM installation is a one-off adventure in which the KM system must be manually customised to the peculiar characteristics of each corporation.

In addition, the market evolution is pushing towards a better integration of formal ontology definition methods within commercial tools, in order to allow for the commercial exchange of existing knowledge.

The time for a knowledge e-conomy is here, and the infrastructure on which to build that e-conomy must be built. Europe is uniquely positioned (thanks to the presence of market leading companies and renowned research organisations), to give birth to the future channel enablers in this market.