News

Oct 22, 2004

The E-Learning Vertical Application Area Internship finished with the formal presentation of the work report. A bundle with all the work, including the Powerpoint presentation and the final report can be found in Research.IKF Private.

Jun 27, 2004

Added Research.IKF members to the WebNotify so all can be automatically notified when something change in the Research.IKF web.

Feb 17, 2004

Start up of this site intended to host all data concerning the development of the Research.IKF project at the University of Minho

Research.IKF-P E!2235

DI/UM Home Page

Project summary:

Research.IKF (Information and Knowledge Fusion) is a Eureka Project (E!2235) aimed at developing an ontology-based distributed infrastructure (Research.IKF Framework) with appropriate toolkits and techniques for intelligent Knowledge Management in a multi-source distributed environment in order to support advanced applications in different domains.

Project background:

The Research.IKF Portuguese consortium (hereby called Research.IKF-P, for "Research.IKF Portugal") is an evolution of the Portuguese partnership in the past SOUR (Eureka 379) project. SOUR was devoted to the development of a CASE-system based on fuzzy-object-based knowledge classification and retrieval targeted at software reuse in large repositories of legacy code [SSS94]. Later developments of SOUR led to an integration of the SOUR platform with Netscape, thus extending the scope of the paradigm to the classification and retrieval of arbitrary Internet information sources [NO96]. In some sense, the 'Research.IKF space' can be regarded as an opportunity for the evolution of these ideas towards a much wider class of knowledge elicitation and representation problems.

Structure of the Research.IKF-P consortium:

 

Sidereus

ParadigmaXis

Univ. of Minho

GESTLUZ

AEP

TECHNOLOGY PRODUCERS

   

X

   

SYSTEM DEVELOPERS

X

X

     

END USERS

     

X

X

Research.IKF-P includes three small-medium software houses and a small university research group specialized in software design technology. The companies have been involved in large software design, maintenance and quality control projects, especially in the areas of heath-care systems, data quality and multimedia.

Further information from:

Forum:

BIC project proposals:

  • Software renovation («infocare»): This is one of the vertical areas of Research.IKF-P. As a technology provider, the DI-UM intends to contribute to this vertical area by building upon the results obtained in former projects such as SOUR (Eureka 379 on software comparison and reuse) and KARMA (data quality via formal data reverse engineering). The availability of the Strafunski toolset makes it very attractive to incorporate in the Research.IKF-framework a "code-knowledge fusion" tool-suite useful for understanding, redocumenting and renovating legacy (foreign) code. This project will develop a bridge between the Research.IKF-P knowledge representation standard and meta-data extracted with Strafunski-based tools. By taking advantage of the formal specification of the former and the functional flavour of the latter, a collection of "plug-in" components is expected to be designed, suited for those Research.IKF clients concerned with legacy software, or structured information sources in general.

  • IKF-P E-Learning Vertical Application Area : In this project, an E-learning system will be implemented and integrated with the Research.IKF-P KM platform currently under development by the Research.IKF-P Consortium. The system to be developed will be based in the formal CAMILA prototype specified by group 39 of the 3rd year computer systems engineering course, in the University of Bristol, during the CAMILA prototyping projects course in 2002/2003. An E-learning system is an online system which delivers an entire learning process to the end user. As such, it must be backed up by all relating information which must be constantly updated to be current and to which every user must have access. This form of teaching will never fully replace the conventional methods currently used, but has key benefits over the conventional techniques such as: (a) Increased flexibility. The nature of the system allows users to access information and assignments at any time (within guidelines set by the system) which in turn allows them to work around their lifestyle and commitments; (b) Reduced overheads. The system, although requiring constant administration, requires far less overheads than conventional methods. Lecture rooms are not required, and the learning process becomes almost paper-less; (c) Increased speed of change. The system can be updated with new information and new courses rapidly, thus allowing it to meet the changing needs of its users. Within Research.IKF-P, the E-Learning application area aims to extend the standard e-learning paradigm with three additional macro functionalities and that will be fully integrated with the Research.IKF-P knowledge management platform: (a) Access to a knowledge network. The system can be used to index contents which are in some how related with a particular domain of interest. This functionality should be used not only by the students in a "self-learning" way, but also by the teachers during not only the preparation of the course, but also during its administration. The knowledge network model is already available as a formal prototype (Specification of the Knowledge Representation Standard of Research.IKF-P!2235, by Candida Susana Gonçalves da Silva). (b) Collect information through the use of the "knowledge index" available in the knowledge management platform. This should help the teachers to prepare both the structure and the contents of a given course and the students to learn directly through related sources available in the Research.IKF-P knowledge management platform; (c) Comparison of topics and contents which are closely related to each other. This should enlarge the "domain of knowledge" that can be explored during an entire learning process.