“Lying at the core of scientific development is the discovery of new knowledge. The rapid increase in the volume and variety of data inherent within e-Science and mirrored by e-Commerce and e-Government means that any supporting infrastructure must provide a set of semantic services. These core services must be able to equip data with meaning and generate a surrounding semantic context in which data can be meaningfully interpreted. Fundamental research on knowledge systems and services is needed to allow us to move from the current data centric view supporting the grid to a semantic grid with a powerful set of knowledge services.”
The JISC and the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council have just announced funding for two projects under the semantic grid initiative. Here's the original call for proposals that gives some of the background to this initiative.
- CO-ODE (Collaborative Open Ontology Development Environment), lead by the University of Manchester.
- e-Bank UK, lead by UKOLN at the University of Bath.
The CO-ODE project in particular sounds interesting.
Although these projects are without doubt important pieces of the semantic web jigsaw, projects that tell us more about how we handle data in every day life are still thin on the ground, although there is an active community.