When a knowledge repository gets very large, finding a particular piece of knowledge can become very difficult. There are two related problems to do with knowledge retrieval. First, there is the issue of finding knowledge again once it has been stored, understanding the structure of your archive in order to navigate through it efficiently. And second, there is the problem of retrieving the subset of content from the repository that is relevant to a particular problem. This second problem, the dynamic extraction of knowledge from a repository, may well set problems for a knowledge retrieval system that alter regularly and quickly during problem-solving.

In knowledge retrieval, the aim would be to develop user-friendly tools for retrieving knowledge from repositories. One obvious place to begin is to try to exploit natural language. Natural language can be used as the basis for the interface to our knowledge services. For instance, ontologies could be used to interpret knowledge queries in natural language forms from users.

The other focus of our effort to meet this challenge is focused around the technologies behind the interface. Our expertise in a number of areas, such as search engines, multimedia thesauri, capability decisions and statistical sampling will be used to increase the efficiency of retrieval technologies, and to provide technologies that cope with the new demands of the semantic web.

In particular, we are very alive to the technological possibilities of the enriched markup of web pages. Given the central importance of the Internet, web pages will clearly be a vital storage and dissemination medium for knowledge. The use of semantic markup technologies such as XML or RDF, driven by our proven knowledge technologies such as ontologies and dynamic hypertext link generation, will enable efficient and accurate retrieval of web pages from the web itself, or from highly structured and possibly very complex intranets.

When knowledge is stored or retrieved, it is important to remove any duplication to avoid overloading users with knowledge. AKT is developing a variety of knowledge fusion techniques to identify and remove such duplications before presenting knowledge to the user.

AKT Technologies addressing issues in Knowledge Retrieval --

• 3store
  A core C library that uses MySQL to store its raw RDF data and caches, forming an important part of the infrastructure required to support a range of knowledgeable services.
  
  
• AKT-Bus
  An open, lightweight, Web standards-based communication infrastructure to support interoperability among knowledge services.
  
  
• ANNIE - Open Source Information Extraction
  An open-source robust information extraction system
  
  
• Aqua
  AQUA is a system which answer questions written in English. It combines several technologies Natural Language Processing, Logic, Information Retrieval and Ontologies.
  
  
• ArtEquAkt
  A system that automatically extracts information about artists from the web, populates an ontology, then uses the knowledge to generate personalised biographies.
  
  
• 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
  
  
• Dome
  A programmable XML editor which is being used in a knowledge extraction role to transform Web pages into RDF.
  
  
• ExtrAKT
  ExtrAKT is a tool for extracting ontologies from Prolog knowledge bases.
  
  
• Floodsim
  A prototype system which demonstrates the benefits of applying semantically rich service descriptions (expressed using Semantic Web technologies) to Web Services.
  
  
• Foxtrot
  Foxtrot is a recommender system which represents user profiles in ontological terms, allowing inference, bootstrapping and profile visualization.
  
  
• GATE - General Architecture for Text Engineering
  GATE is a stable, robust, and scalable open-source infrastructure which allows users to build and customise language processing components, while it handles mundane tasks like data storage, format analysis and data visualisation.
  
  
• KnoZilla
  
  
  
• Knowledge Broker
  The knowledge broker addresses the problem of knowledge service location in distributed environments.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• ONTOCOPI
  A tool which uncovers Communities Of Practise by analysing the connectivity of instances in the 3store knowledge base.