Knowledge for Everyman

Abstract

Increasing globalization creates situations with wide-ranging effects on large communities, often requiring global responses and innovative solutions. Timely examples are climate and environmental changes related to rapid growth and economic development. Natural and man-made unforeseen catastrophes like oil spills, landslides and floods require immediate action that might crucially rely on information and expertise available only from sources far removed from the crisis site. Knowledge sharing and transfer are also essential for sustainable long-term growth and development. In both kinds of cases, it is important that information and experience be made available and widely shared, communicated and encoded for future re-use. The global scope of many problems and their solutions requires furthermore that information and communication be accessible to communities crossing languages and cultures. Finally, an appropriate system for recording, maintaining and sharing information must be accessible to both experts and laymen.

The goal of the European Union-funded KYOTO project (Knowledge-Yielding Ontologies for Transition-Based Organization, http://www.kyoto-project.eu ) is to develop an information and knowledge sharing system that relates documents in several languages to lexical resources and a common central ontology and allows for deep semantic analysis. KYOTO facilitates the crosslinguistic and crosscultural construction and maintenance of a sophisticated knowledge system among the members of domain-specific communities. Representation, storage and retrieval of a shared terminology takes place via a Wiki platform. Relevant terms are anchored in a language-independent, customizable formal ontology that connects the lexicons of seven languages (Basque, Chinese, Dutch, English, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish) and that guarantees a uniform interpretation of terms across languages. The semantic representations in the ontology are accessible to a computer and allow deep textual analysis and reasoning operations.

KYOTO’s target domains are the environment and biodiversity, with appropriate experts acting as “users”. Once developed, the system will be available for extension to any domain.