Leibniztag - edoc-Server der BBAW - Berlin-Brandenburgische ...

� e goal of KYOTO is to develop an information system that provides deep semantic
search and access to large quantities of distributed multimedia data for both experts
and the general public, covering a broad range of data from wide-spread sources
in a number of culturally diverse languages. Speci� cally, KYOTO focuses on the environmental
domain and involves users from two environmental groups, in addition
to several international research groups. � e system is developed for English, Dutch,
Italian, Spanish, Basque, Chinese and Japanese and relies on an ontology linked to
wordnets – lexical semantic databases – in a variety of languages. Concept extraction
and data mining are applied through a chain of semantic processors that re-use the
knowledge for diff erent languages and for particular domains. � e shared ontology
guarantees a uniform interpretation for diverse types of information from diff erent
sources and languages. � e system can be maintained by � eld specialists using a Wikiplatform
and used by experts and laymen alike. Ultimately, KYOTO is a generic system
that will off er knowledge acquisition and transition for any domain and a wide
range of user groups across linguistic, cultural and geographic borders.
Research at the BBAW: Overview
� e BBAW is one of several core project partners. � e Berlin group is led by Christiane
Fellbaum and includes Axel Herold, Amanda Hicks and � omas Pfuhl. � e Berlin
team was assigned the main responsibility for Work Package Six, which can be described
as follows.
Domain-speci� c documents are appropriately marked up, tagged and parsed
such that information about key concepts and their interrelations as well as stated
and implied facts can be extracted. (� e mark-up follows the latest ISO standards.)
Domain specialists without linguistic expertise can encode the information reliably
and accurately in a pre-existing semantic network (wordnet) in their language. From
these extensions to the individual wordnets appropriate mappings are made to a language-independent,
formal ontology. (An ontology is a formal, logically structured
representation of concepts.) � e ontology expresses not only the domain-speci� c
concepts encoded by experts, but includes top-level as well as mid-level layers. � e
shared ontology will be based on existing formal ontologies, in particular DOL-
CE, and extended with semantic information that is currently stored in the English
WordNet lexical database and various knowledge resources linked to it. Concepts in
the enriched English WordNet are candidates for inclusion in the language-independent
ontology.
In order to maximally exploit the created resources, new capabilities for reasoning
and logical inference will be added to the knowledge base by means of advanced
� eorem Provers. � ese capabilities are essential for verifying meta-properties like
consistency, and for the deduction of implicit properties from the explicit informati-
326 | Berichte der Projekte und Initiativen