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AKT is a multi-million pound, six year collaboration between internationally recognised research groups at the Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, the Open University, Sheffield and Southampton. The project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). "The AKT project aims to develop and extend a range of technologies providing integated methods and services for the capture, modelling, publishing, reuse and management of knowledge." Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Director of the AKT Project

AKT Sponsored Conferences --

WWW 2006 World Wide Web Conference 2006
ISWC 2005 International Semantic Web Conference 2005
ESWC 2005 European Semantic Web Conference 2005
AKT-SWS04 1st AKT Workshop on Semantic Web Services
14th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management
1st European Semantic Web Symposium

 

Information is all around us. Never has it been so easy to collect. Never has it been so easy to store. Never has there been such easy access to it. And yet this info-bonanza is seen all too frequently not as a boon, but as a burden. The information you actually need is often concealed by information that you don't need; it is covered by a blanket of info-smog. To realise the opportunity of our information-rich environment, you need to extract knowledge from information, value from the info-smog. New resources, such as the semantic web, are the key to extracting the value from your informational assets.

Let us define knowledge as usable information. What does "usable" mean here? If information is usable, then that information can be matched with, and brought to bear upon, the particular problems your business or organisation is addressing. And conversely, when you understand a problem, that gives you an indication of the information you need to solve it. To turn your information into knowledge, it is necessary to understand the connections between it and your business processes. It is necessary to understand what information to use when, how to find it, and how to present it to the relevant people.

The trouble is, that is easy to say and hard to do. We generally lack the capabilities required to transform our information into knowledge. Put bluntly, we have information technology, but we don't have knowledge technology. If knowledge is to be managed effectively, for the good of its owners (or custodians), then Advanced Knowledge Technologies will have to be part of the solution.