OAK | Information and Knowledge

Current Projects

With the coming changes to higher education funding it is critical that higher education bodies are able to effectively demonstrate that they are widening participation and efficiently recruiting students from across the country. Thus it is vital that the higher education bodies have accurate and usable information regarding the student population. Thus higher education bodies must increase their Business Intelligence with regard to understanding the student population.

RAnDMS

RAnDMS will study, implement and evaluate Real-time Data and Visual Analytic techniques to enable emergency responders and government bodies, to monitor and make sense of local, regional and global events using web scale data from social and traditional media streams. The data gathering task will be defined as identifying, correlating, integrating and presenting data and information, in order to understand situations as they arise. Current technology does not provide efficient and effective solutions, as it mainly focuses on detecting trends in the use of keywords and tags.

Samulet Project

SEALS

The SEALS Project is developing a reference infrastructure known as the SEALS Platform to facilitate the formal evaluation of semantic technologies. This allows both large-scale evaluation campaigns to be run (such as the International Evaluation Campaigns for Semantic Technologies) as well as ad-hoc evaluations by individuals or organizations.

Siloet Project

The Big Energy Upgrade

The Big Energy Upgrade will see the University of Sheffield work alongside partners and disadvantaged communities to monitor the performance of the installed measures, look at behavioural issues linked with energy consumption, support the supply chain associated with the project and monitor energy consumption in selected households across Yorkshire and Humber.

Past Projects

Abraxas

Abraxas is an EPSRC funded project on learning ontologies from documents.

AKT

AKT is a six-year project funded by EPSRC for research on advanced knowledge technologies.

Archaeotools

Archaeotools is a two year project to be cooperated between the University of Sheffield and the Archaeology Data Service, aimed at building an e-archaeology application to allow archaeologists to discover, share, and analyse datasets and legacy publications which have hitherto been very difficult to integrate into existing digital frameworks.

Cilla

Kodak funded Cilla, a project to investigate and devise systems that enable users to retrieve personal and immediate community images using search and browse functionalities based on captured knowledge of the image content. A prerequisite to these activities is an understanding of the image, knowledge of the user, name, relations etc, and a method by which the user’s desire can be represented for search and ordering activities.

Data.dcs.shef.ac.uk

The data.dcs project investigates methods and techniques to create Linked Data describing people, research groups and publications within the Department of Computer Science based at the University of Sheffield.

The Web of Linked Data is now a widely used distributed source of information for applications and agents. It links together resources and entities by typing links using formal semantics.
Information within the department's web site is provided within legacy HTML documents and RSS publication feeds. Such information must therefore be leveraged in a machine-readable form so that it can then be woven into the Web of Linked Data.

Dot.Kom

Dot.Kom was a project funded by the European Commission on the use of Adaptive Information Extraction for Knowledge Management and the Semantic Web. It is coordinated by us.

Environment Agency

This was a research collaboration with the UK Environmental Agency in Bath about the use of Semantic Web and HCI technologies for horizon scanning.

GrassPortal

GrassPortal is a JISC project in collaboration with RBG Kew and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics that will develop a web portal and visualisation tools to support biologist in bringing together herbarium records, phylogenetic data and ecology data about grass species. The project is lead by Colin Osborne in Animal and Plant Sciences. The OAK Group is involved in requirements gathering and evaluation and our spin-out company K-now is building the portal.

IPAS

IPAS was a project on Distributed Products and Services funded by the DTI and coordinated by Rolls Royce . Participants are Rolls Royce, the Universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, Aberdeen and Southampton; Abiuri and Epistemics.

IPAS Extension

IPAS XWB: a 9 month project fully funded by Rolls-Royce plc. Goal of the project is to support knowledge management in the development of the Trent XWB engine. This is a floow-up of the IPAS project.

Lycos

Lycos funded a project to investigate the current market for knowledge sharing platforms. Our research focuses on the integration of semantic technologies with the management of user generated knowledge, which will in turn generate new features and ideas for user generated knowledge management.

Multimatch

On the web, cultural heritage content is everywhere, in traditional environments such as libraries, museums, galleries and audiovisual archives, but also in popular magazines and newspapers, in multiple languages and multiple media. The aim of the MultiMATCH project is to enable users to explore and interact with online accessible cultural heritage content, across media types and languages boundaries.

SmartProducts

Smart products help customers, designers and workers to deal with the ever increasing complexity and variety of modern products. Smart products leverage "proactive knowledge" to communicate and co-operate with humans, other products and the environment. The OAK team is focssing on knowledge management aspects of the project including capturing and processing knowledge. For example we are looking at extracting procedural knowledge from instructional texts to drive the user interaction and to populate ontologies. We are also extending a workflow editor to allow developers to edit and semantically annotate extracted workflows.

WeKnowIt

The main objective of WeKnowIt is to develop novel techniques for exploiting multiple layers of intelligence from user-contributed content, which together constitute Collective Intelligence, a form of intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition among many individuals, and that seemingly has a mind of its own.

X-Media

IP project started in March 2006. X-Media is coordinated by our group. With a budget topping €13m, it is one of the largest projects funded in the area of IST knowledge and content technologies within Framework 6 of the European Union.