Accumulated Knowledge DELIVERABLE 6.1

The goal of the KYOTO project is to develop a system that allows speakers of different languages and with different backgrounds to find, use, and extend shared knowledge. Thus, our challenge is to make available to the user the information contained in domain-specific knowledge bases, lexical databases and ontologies as well as in documents available on the web. Furthermore, we need to provide tools to integrate and build on available knowledge in a flexible and non-technical, intuitively accessible way. This deliverable represents, first, the result of our work gathering existing knowledge sources and evaluating them with respect to their inherent qualities and specifically for their suitability as components in the KYOTO system. Concerning lexical resources, a well-developed wordnet is available for each the partner's language; domain-specific additions will be made in the course if the project. Concerning ontologies, we carefully examined the several available ones with respect to their logical consistency and power for inferencing and reasoning. Each offered certain advantages and disadvantages, as reflected in the "gear wheel" model proposed in section 7, which allows users to choose their ontology. We also gathered information about available databases, ontologies, taxonomies, and thesauri that pertain to the domains of interest of KYOTO, including geography, biodiversity and biological species. The richness of these resources provides a solid underpinnings upon which KYOTO can be developed. Second, we address ways in which to integrate the various knowledge sources. We are well on our way to develop a tool for the automatic mapping of lexical entities and the corresponding ontological representations; a carefully selected set of lexicalized concepts that will serve as a test set for the ontology annotation tool is appended. The final part of this deliverable describes the core component of the system and details and exemplifies the architecture of KYOTO. In developing ways for the integration of the knowledge sources and their interaction within the system, we strive towards a degree of flexibility that allows the user easy access to the information and that facilitates the user's extension and customization of the knowledge base. The challenge we address is to build a highly sophisticated system and rich, language-independent knowledge representations in a way that is truly usable and extensible by non-technical domain experts.