Modelling bridges the gap between the acquisition of knowledge and its use. Knowledge model structures must be able to represent knowledge so that it can be used for problem-solving. One important knowledge modelling idea is that of ontologies, which are specifications of the generic concepts, attributes, relations and axioms of a knowledge base or domain. Ontologies can act as placeholders and organising structures for acquired knowledge, while also providing a format for understanding how knowledge will be used.

In knowledge modelling, the central issue with which our vision is concerned is the semantic web. The Internet and the WWW are clearly key focuses of AKT's future development and exploitation, and we will need to track and influence the development of the semantic web. AKT shall investigate the emerging suite of languages for expressing knowledge and exploiting the possibilities of the semantic web. The use of ontologies, will be a central idea to look at here, but will not be the only focus of our work.

There will also be a drive to examine special-purpose modelling formalisms for particular important subsets of discourse. One example will be the modelling of best practice procedures; the dissemination and sharing of best practice across an organisation or firm is clearly going to be one of the most important applications of knowledge sharing. Another example, again central to our user base's concerns, is the modelling of argumentation and design rationales. Often with an artefact - which may be a piece of knowledge as well as a concrete object - knowing what design decisions, constraints and pressures led to the creation of an object of that particular form is key to understanding a domain.

Finally, we are also working on the next generation of general purpose tools to support knowledge markup (i.e. enabling users to enrich web content semantically). These tools assist in the creation of one or more semantic layers from different perspectives, using different ontologies, and amenable to multiple representations for different user groups.

AKT Technologies addressing issues in Knowledge Modelling --

• AKT Research Map
  A competence map for members of the AKT project
  
  
• Applications of FCA in AKT
  Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is used in a variety of application scenarios in AKT in order to perform concept-based domain analysis and automatically deduce a taxonomy lattice of that domain.
  
  
• Automatic Support for Enterprise Modelling and Workflow
  Knowledge management using multi-modelling techniques and how modelling activities may be assisted with automation based on formal methods.
  
  
• CASD
  A tool for producing system architecture diagrams from service and data descriptions.
  
  
• COCKATOO
  A knowledge acquisition tool which can be used to produce a set of cases for use with a Case-Based Reasoning system.
  
  
• Compendium
  Compendium is a semantic, visual hypertext tool for supporting collaborative domain modelling and real time meeting capture
  
  
• ConcepTool
  A system to model, analyse, verify, validate, share, combine, and reuse domain knowledge bases and ontologies, reasoning about their implication.
  
  
• Floodsim
  A prototype system which demonstrates the benefits of applying semantically rich service descriptions (expressed using Semantic Web technologies) to Web Services.
  
  
• I-X Process Panels
  The I-X tool suite supports principled collaborations of human and computer agents in the creation or modification of some product.
  
  
• IF-Map
  IF-Map is an Information Flow based ontology mapping method. It is based on the theoretical grounds of logic of distributed systems and provides an automated streamlined process for generating mappings between ontologies of the same domain.
  
  
• Internet Reasoning Service
  The Internet Reasoning Service provides a a number of tools which supports the publication, location, composition and execution of heterogeneous web services, specified using semantic web technology
  
  
• KRAFT - I-X TIE
  Supports collaboration among members of a virtual organisation by integrating workflow and communication technology with constraint solving.
  
  
• NMARKUP
  NMARKUP helps the user build ontologies by detecting nouns in texts and by providing support for the creation of an ontology based on the entities extracted.
  
  
• Semantic Annotation with MnM
  MnM is a semantic annotation tool which provides manual, automated and semi-automated support for annotating web pages with 'semantics', i.e., machine interpretable descriptions.
  
  
• WebOnto
  WebOnto supports the browsing, creation and editing of ontologies through coarse grained and fine grained visualizations and direct manipulation.