The Consortium consists of 7 partners. The make-up of the Consortium guarantees that scientific, technological and development objectives of the project will be met, and its main strength is a firm pan-European (international) partnership, whose synergy will provide far more than each partner working independently. Within the EU, we have 4 national states represented (U.K., Spain, Slovenia, France), one associated candidate state (Bulgaria), and the presence of world-class expertise in all the major segments of the work: Semantic Web, Semantic Web Services, large-scale repositories, knowledge and text mining, Human Language Technology, and industrial exploitation.

 

The consortium includes internationally leading groups, who will undertake RTD on Semantic Web services (SOTON – a university, ATOS – large industrial partner); knowledge discovery and text mining (JSI, USFD); Human Language Technology (USFD); and two SMEs that provide innovative knowledge technology solutions for customers (ONTO and MON). There are two users providing input to TAO: (1) USFD will participate in a case-study to evaluate the TAO tools in transitioning its world-leading HLT infrastructure to Semantic Web Services; (2) Dassault Aviation (DASSAV) will lead the case study on transitioning business process applications.

 

There are three kinds of partners in the consortium: R&D partners, technology providers, and users. Academic partners will be the R&D partners; they will carry out research on the novel TAO transitioning methodology, learning domain ontology, automatic content augmentation, and scalable heterogeneous repositories. The industrial partners will be the technical providers, who will build the TAO infrastructure and also help carry out the two case studies. The users will provide requirements for the technology to be developed and test the produced tools in their use cases.

 

Another strong point of the consortium is that most of the partners have collaborated in the past and/or are currently collaborating in EC funded RTD projects and Networks of Excellence.

While being a newcomer to the EC programme on semantic-based systems, SOTON is among the international leaders in the field, including such notables as the W3C director Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who is now a professor at SOTON. In addition, SOTON is coordinating the multi-million UK-funded interdisciplinary research project on advanced knowledge technologies (AKT), where they collaborate with USFD and four other leading UK universities. Their active involvement at European level promises to consolidate and strengthen further pan-European research on semantic-based systems.

 

The TAO consortium brings together world-leading expertise in a number of inter-related areas:

 

-Semantic repositories based on Semantic Web technology and standards, including RDF(S) repositories, OWL, ontology middleware and reasoning.

 

-Cutting-edge research and technology on Semantic Web Services and Agents to provide standard, scalable, and interoperable distributed infrastructure.

 

-Mature infrastructure for scalable and customizable information extraction from structured and unstructured data.

 

-Knowledge discovery and data mining technology for handling structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data such as catalogues, databases, and text.

 

 

SME Involvement - the consortium includes two SMEs that provide innovative knowledge technology products and solutions (Ontotext and Mondeca). The former is from an EU associated candidate state (Bulgaria) and the other is from an EU member state (France).