Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Dealing with the overwhelming amount of information readily available today is one of the biggest challenges for individuals, as well as organizations. Current database and information retrieval systems enable users to quickly obtain vast amounts of information in textual form -- but a serious bottleneck remains by reading, interpreting, and using the collected information. Clearly, users are in dire need of more advanced, semantically-oriented systems that help them analyzing, transforming, and creating knowledge from large amounts of (textual) data. Foundations for this kind of support have been developed for many years in fields like text mining, ontology, and the Semantic Web. Yet widespread support has not yet materialized in the tools and desktop environments available in current systems. This is due to a gap between current knowledge analysis research, which aims at algorithmic foundations and is rarely concerned with software engineering questions, and software engineering research that likewise barely targets the systematic engineering of knowledge-intensive systems and their particular requirements. This research aims to close this gap. It is one of the first to address both software engineering of semantic systems, as well as knowledge management foundations using ontology and text mining approaches. Foundations and applications are developed in close collaboration with domain experts. One particular domain is software engineering itself, which thus becomes both foundation and target for semantic system development. The research will progress from short-term objectives, analyzing requirements and developing foundations for fields like biomedical research, cultural heritage data management, and business intelligence, to long-term foundations in semantic system engineering. A central focus and testbed of our research targets the conceptual and technical integration of semantic technologies with common desktop environments, including word processors, email clients, Web browsers and software development environments, which will fundamentally change the way users interact with their systems.