The challenge of publishing or disseminating can be described as getting the right knowledge, in the right form, in the right place, to the right person, at the right time. Different users will require knowledge presented and visualised in different ways, and the quality of such presentation is not merely a matter of preference, but can radically affect the value of the knowledge to the user. Getting presentation right will involve understanding the different perspectives of people with different agendas, while an understanding of knowledge content will help to ensure that important related pieces of knowledge get published at the appropriate time.

There are two promising areas for the beginning of our work. Firstly, there is the construction of visualisations. These are essential for making knowledge usable, however well managed it is before it reaches the user. The aim would be to take the knowledge that is stored in knowledge models and synthesise web pages from such models according to the requirements of the user. Agent technology could be exploited to publish online; another line of enquiry would be the use of natural language summarisation tools linked to automatic web publishing tools.

AKT is looking at the problem of publishing from a number of angles. AKT has its own on-line "newspaper", AKT-Planet, managed by intelligent agent software, formatting and presenting stories in such a way as to minimise the workload of reporters and maximising reader benefits. Research issues include how best to sustain search through archives, and how to provide personalised news alerts.

AKT Technologies addressing issues in Knowledge Publishing --

• ArtEquAkt
  A system that automatically extracts information about artists from the web, populates an ontology, then uses the knowledge to generate personalised biographies.
  
  
• COHSE - Conceptual Open Hypermedia Services Environment
  COHSE researches methods to improve significantly the quality, consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval and authoring time.
  
  
• CS AKTiveSpace
  CS AKTiveSpace is a smart browser interface for a Semantic Web application that provides ontologically motivated information about the UK computer science research community.
  
  
• Compendium
  Compendium is a semantic, visual hypertext tool for supporting collaborative domain modelling and real time meeting capture
  
  
• D3E - Digital Document Discourse Environment
  D3E enables the easy conversion of websites or structured documents into interactive discussion sites
  
  
• Floodsim
  A prototype system which demonstrates the benefits of applying semantically rich service descriptions (expressed using Semantic Web technologies) to Web Services.
  
  
• 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
  
  
• KnoZilla
  
  
  
• Magpie
  Magpie supports the interpretation of web documents through on-the-fly ontologically based enrichment. Semantic services can be invoked either by the user or be automatically triggered by patterns of browsing activity
  
  
• MyPlanet
  MyPlanet allows users to create a personalised version of a web based newsletter using an ontologically based profile.
  
  
• OntoPortal
  Enables the authoring and navigation of large semantically-powered portals
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• Visualisations for the CS AKTive Portal
  Maps are used to geographically illustrate knowledge from the Triplestore, such as highlighting the locations in the UK that are active in a particular research area.
  
  
• eServices
  The e-Services framework provides advanced scholarly services (in particular visualisations) using distributed metadata.