Karlsruhe, May 14th, 2007 - Seattle based Vulcan Inc. has selected ontoprise GmbH (headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany) as its prime contractor to develop a semantic wiki for Vulcan's long-term Project Halo research program. The semantic wiki will serve as a web-based collaboration tool for the user-friendly and low-cost acquisition of scientific knowledge for Project Halo. The successful ontoprise team includes specialists from ontoprise and its project partners at the Institute AIFB of the University of Karlsruhe, and the Saarbrücken-based German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). In April 2007, ontoprise and its partners completed the semantic wiki design phase, which represents the first major milestone towards developing the semantic wiki.

 

Vulcan has created Project Halo to develop a "digital Aristotle" that can serve as a comprehensive computer knowledge base and problem-solving system for the natural sciences. Project Halo is focused on large-scale formal modeling of basic scientific knowledge - primarily physics, chemistry, and biology - and developing methods for automatically answering sophisticated questions. Possible applications of Project Halo include automated tutors for students, or knowledge-based systems for supporting scientific work.

 

Successful Approval of Design Phase

The Design Phase Report submitted by the ontoprise project team lays the foundation for a set of groundbreaking new functions to be added to Semantic MediaWiki. Semantic MediaWiki is branch of the open-source MediaWiki software that has been enhanced with semantic markup capabilities. The knowledge modeled in the semantic Wiki can be accessed via a reasoning system (OntoBroker®) to deduce new knowledge and directly answer questions. An interconnected mapping tool (OntoMap®) enables the purposeful selection of knowledge from the wiki to be incorporated into Project Halo's reasoning system.

 

This first major milestone represents the designs that have been developed over a three month period, and met with a very positive approval from Vulcan. The design has been driven by the requirements of a representative user group and has been validated against those requirements. "I am very impressed and pleased by the team's work," comments Mark Greaves, program manager at Vulcan Inc. "It is impressively well-structured and thorough, and lays out a well motivated set of designs that I think will be very good for the Halo project. I am looking forward to the implementation."

 

"The intended functions will make the semantic Wiki a powerful and a user-friendly modeling tool", adds Prof. Dr. Jürgen Angele, managing director of ontoprise GmbH. "Thus, ontoprise will not only be able to decisively strengthen its lead over comparable Wiki systems, but will also become internationally visible as a strong player in the range of Semantic Web technologies through close interaction with the Semantic Wiki community."

 

About Vulcan Inc.

Vulcan Inc. creates and advances a variety of world-class endeavors and high-impact initiatives that change and improve the way people live, learn, do business and experience the world. Founded in 1986 by investor and philanthropist Paul G. Allen, and under the direction of president and CEO Jody Patton, Vulcan oversees various business and charitable projects including real estate holdings, investments in more than 40 companies, including Charter Communications, DreamWorks Animation SKG, Digeo Broadband, the Seattle Seahawks NFL and Portland Trail Blazers NBA franchises, First & Goal Inc., Vulcan Productions, the Seattle Cinerama theatre, Experience Music Project, the Science Fiction Museum & Hall of Fame, the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. For more information about Vulcan, please visit www.vulcan.com.