Project acronym: | KYOTO |
Project full title: | Knowledge Yielding Ontologies for Transition-based Organization |
Grant agreement no.: | 211423 |
Co-funded by EU - FP7 ICT Work Programme 2007 under Challenge 4 - Digital libraries and Content | |
co-funded by the European Union 
Objective ICT-2007.4.2 (ICT-2007.4.4): Intelligent Content and Semantics (challenge 4.2).
KYOTO makes knowledge sharable between communities of people, culture, languages and computers, by assigning meaning to text and giving text to meaning
The globalization of markets and communication brings with it a concomitant globalization of world-wide problems and the need for new solutions. Timely examples are global warming, climate change and other environmental issues related to rapid growth and economic developments. Environmental problems can be acute, requiring immediate support and action, relying on information available elsewhere. Knowledge sharing and transfer are also essential for sustainable growth and development on a longer term. In both cases, it is important that distributed information and experience can be re-used on a global scale. The globalization of problems and their solutions requires that information and communication be supported across a wide range of languages and cultures. Such a system should furthermore allow both experts and laymen to access this information in their own language, without recourse to cultural background knowledge.
The goal of KYOTO is a system that allows people in communities to define the meaning of their words and terms in a shared Wiki platform so that it becomes anchored across languages and cultures but also so that a computer can use this knowledge to detect knowledge and facts in text. Whereas the current Wikipedia uses free text to share knowledge, KYOTO will represent this knowledge so that a computer can understand it. For example, the notion of environmental footprint will become defined in the same way in all these languages but also in such a way that the computer knows what information is necessary to calculate a footprint. With these definitions it will be possible to find information on footprints in documents, websites and reports so that users can directly ask the computer for actual information in their environment.
