KYOTO · Knowledge Yielding Ontologies for Transition-based Organization

With the globalization of markets and communication, we are experiencing globalization of problems in the world and of the solutions to these problems. An actual example is global warming and other environmental problems related to rapid growth and economic developments. Globalization of problems and their solutions require that information and communication is supported across a wide range of languages and cultures. This requires a system that can collect distributed information that is structured differently and expressed differently in languages and represent it in a uniform way. It also means that people can access this information in their language and without cultural background knowledge, as experts or laymen. Environmental problems can be acute, requiring immediate support and information available elsewhere. However, knowledge sharing and transitions is also essential for sustainable growth and development on a longer term. In both cases, it is important that distributed information and experience can be re-used on a global scale.<br/>The goal of Kyoto is to develop a content enabling system that provides semantic search and information access to large quantities of distributed multimedia data for both experts and the general public, over a variety of data from wide-spread sources in a range of culturally diverse languages. This is enabled through an ontology linked to wordnets for a variety of languages. Concept extraction and data mining is applied through a chain of semantic processors. The shared ontology guarantees a uniform interpretation for the diverse information from different sources and languages. The system can be maintained by field-specialists using a Wiki platform. Kyoto is a generic system offering knowledge transition across different target groups in society and across linguistic, cultural and geographic borders. Kyoto will be applied to the environmental domain and span global information across European and non-European languages.