The CoAKTinG (Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Grid) project started in June 2002 and runs for 24 months. It is funded by the UK e-Science Programme.

Its objective is to advance the state of the art in collaborative mediated spaces for distributed e-Science through the novel application of advanced knowledge technologies, such as:

• Ontologies to enhance multi-modal and multi-media time phased group discussions and problem solving
• Knowledge-based planning and task support to enhance issue-based process/activity discussions
• Scholarly discourse and argumentation to enhance collaborative meeting structures
• Presence and visualisation to enhance group peripheral awareness at a distance

In particular, the project aims to support e-Science collaboration by integrating and demonstrating the utility of tools and techniques developed at the three partner institutions. These will be used alongside current Grid collaboration tools such as the Access Grid and VRVS.

As part of the project, the CoAKTinG tools have been deployed and enhanced in support of several scenarios, including e-Response, Combechem, and Mars exploration.

The CoAKTinG project has made a significant impact, leading to funding on two new follow-on projects:

• Co-OPR: Collaborative Operations for Personnel Recovery
  

  Joint project between AKT partners University of Edinburgh (AIAI) and OU (KMI). This 6 month pilot project (July-Dec 2004) demonstrated the use of KMI's Compendium dialogue mapping and visual modelling tool to support analysis of the diplomatic, economic and social implications of hostage/personnel recovery missions in a simulated UN coalition scenario. Compendium was integrated with Edinburgh's I-X planning technology to show the synergy between human and machine reasoning, whereby Compendium can pass I-X issues for deliberation, and I-X can pass back Compendium options.

  • Project website: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/co-opr
  • news story: http://news.kmi.open.ac.uk/rostra/news.php?r=6&t=2&id=702
• Memetic: Meeting Memory Technologies Informing Collaboration
  

  Joint project between AKT partners Southampton (IAM), OU (KMI) and two others, Edinburgh (Informatics) and Manchester (UK AccessGrid Centre). This 21 month project (Feb 2005 - Oct 2006), funded by JISC's Virtual Research Environments programme. The overall aim of the project is to extend the functionality of the next generation AccessGrid collaboration environment with advanced meeting support and information management tools that were developed and validated in the recent e-Science project, CoAKTinG. The project will also deploy this environment as a prototype Virtual Reseach Environment with end-user communities in order to test, evaluate and discover further user requiremen ts.

  • Project website: http://www.memetic-vre.net