SEWASIE

 

Semantic Webs and AgentS in Integrated Economies

 

 

IST-2001-34825

 

 

 

 

SEWASIE will design and implement an advanced search engine enabling intelligent access to heterogeneous data sources on the web via semantic enrichment to provide the basis of structured secure web-based communication.

Objectives:

to develop a distributed agent-based architecture of semantic search and communication using community-specific multilingual ontologies; to equip ontologies with an inference layer grounded in W3C standards; to develop prototypes that meet the needs of SMEs in a EU context; to obtain practical experience (user requirements, potential added value, risks etc.).

Benefits:

reduction of transaction costs by efficient search and communication facilities; integrated system of search and negotiate in a business context; enable technology uptake for SMEs; support stronger stand of SMEs against large competitors.
Exploitation: technical services (consulting, training, support, awareness raising).
In order to meet the objectives, SEWASIE will
· develop an architecture for the proposed distributed agent-based system for semantic search (based on ontologies) and for structured secure web-based communication (for electronic negotiations)
· provide semantic enrichment processes for knowledge-based extraction of meta-information of the heterogeneous data sources
· map the metadata of an ontology to the concepts of the data sources and to the data instances
· provide a logical layer based on Description Logics properly grounded in W3C standard such as RDF(S), XML, XML Schema.
· provide the user with efficient interfaces for formulating a query using a graphical representation and for intelligent navigation through the semantically enriched information space
· answer user agent queries in a distributed setting that includes merging and compiling sets of queries and accessing the useful sources of information
· provide a general framework for query management and information reconciliation based on a semantically enriched data and trusted agent infrastructure
· personalise and contextualise information both from data sources and provided by query results
· provide means of structured secure web-based communication, exemplified for electronic negotiations in business-to-business electronic commerce
· integrate agent frameworks with human communication
· maintain and update relevant ontologies
· provide multilingual ontologies
· provide sophisticated metadata management used for querying, contextualising, visualising, and communicating about web information
· visualise search results and communication steps for the user.
Based on extensive analysis of user requirements, milestones are the development of a global system architecture, the prototype releases, the subsequent testing and user evaluations for improvement and the integration of system components. We expect to develop an efficient and secure system for semantic search and structured ontology-based communication that is useful and usable for SMEs helping them to form strategic (cross-country) alliances in order to compete against large companies.