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The WICK Project

 


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Last updated:  Wed. March 14, 2003

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WiCK, The Knowledge Writing Project

Writing in the Context of Knowledge

WicK is a research project that officially began in October 2002 and ended in October 2004
The scope of WicK is described in the project proposal.
Funded by: The EPSRC Realising Our Potential (ROPA) Programme
R&D centres: Southampton University
Mission: Knowledge Management - Content Creation - Knowledge Publishing - Linking
Keywords: ontologies, metadata, concept linking, annotations

The WiCK project's original name is KWiC standing for Knowledge Writing in Context


Organisations are increasingly concerned with knowledge management, and have acquired large intranets (multimedia information Web sites) in order to capture their corporate knowledge. This resource-base has typically been gradually collected in an unsystematic fashion; furthermore the use to which this information is put varies with the role of each user within the organisation and the type and context of the information that has been assembled. As the intranet grows in size and complexity, it becomes impractical to build and use it in the present ad hoc and labour intensive fashion.

The Semantic Web is more than just a repository of information; the meaning of the documents, knowledge about their authors and the reasons for their publication are all used to infer contextually appropriate associations, i.e. knowledge. The ability to publish new material so that at some later date it can be appropriately reused should be the goal of the IT strategy of any organisation with a suitably sophisticated infrastructure.

By way of example, a manager writing a policy statement is required to draw together information held in a number of business documents: corporate vision statements, corporate strategy documents, departmental policy documents, management summaries, financial reports, public relations statements etc. While reading the content of those documents, the manager will also want to know their purpose (e.g. the intended audience) and authorship (e.g. the authors' position of influence) in order to be confident about any inferences made from the documents. However, managers do not often have sufficient time to digest the supplementary documentation in order to evaluate its appropriateness. What they require is a system that will offer relevant material from appropriate documents, based on the context in which new material is being written. The new document should be published in a form that facilitates reuse of the new knowledge embodied within it, and which provides explicit references to the sources of any reused knowledge.

There exist established and effective means of modelling relationships within a structured hypermedia information space. Hypermedia design methodologies address the relations between information assets to provide site design and navigation features at the macro-structure (document or Web page) level. We believe that by extending these design methodologies to represent the relationships at a microstructure level, the hypermedia design structure can be adapted to encode knowledge relationships, and hence form the basis of the knowledge services described above.


This page http://wick.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
EPSRC

The WicK project is funded by the EPSRC

MORE INFORMATION?
Email::
Les Carr, Project Manager
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 4479
Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865

OR POST TO:

WicK Project,
IAM Group,
Department of Electronics & Computer Science,
University of Southampton,
Highfield,
Southampton
SO17 1BJ, UK