Ontology mapping is a prerequisite for achieving heterogeneous data integration on the Semantic Web. The vision of the Semantic Web implies that a large number of ontologies present on the web need to be aligned before one can make use of them, for example, a question answering on the Semantic Web. At the same time, these ontologies can be used as domain-specific background knowledge by the ontology mapping systems to increase the mapping precision. However, these ontologies can differ in representation, quality, and size that pose different challenges to ontology mapping. In this paper, we analyze these challenges and introduce a multiagent ontology mapping framework that has been designed to operate effectively in the Semantic Web environment.

This paper reports on the design of a Second Life campus for a new innovative post-graduate research programme at the Open University, UK, a world leader in supported distance higher education. The programme, launched in October 2009, is a part-time Master of Philosophy (MPhil) to be delivered at a distance, supported by a blend of synchronous and asynchronous Internet technologies. This paper briefly discusses the pedagogical thinking behind the Second Life campus, and the way the implementation was designed to meet the pedagogy. The paper also reports on the outcome of an early evaluation we have conducted.

This paper describes a system which recognizes events on news stories. Our system classifies stories and populates a hand-crafted ontology with new instances of classes defined in it. Currently, our system recognizes events which can be classified as belonging to a single category and it also recognizes overlapping events within one article (more than one event is recognized). In each case, the system provides a confidence value associated to the suggested classification. Our system uses Information Extraction and Machine Learning technologies. The system was tested using a corpus of 200 news articles from an archive of electronic news stories describing the academic life of the Knowledge Media (KMi). In particular, these news stories describe events such as a project award, publications, visits, etc.)

Formative work by Lave and Wenger has articulated how practices emerge through the interplay of informal processes with symbolic codifications and artifacts. In this paper, we describe how ontologies can serve as symbolic tools within a community of practice supporting communication and knowledge sharing. We show that when a community's perspective on an issue is stable, it opens the possibility for introducing knowledge services, based on an ontology co-constructed by knowledge engineers with stakeholders. Using a case study we describe our approach, ontology driven document enrichment, looking at how ontology construction and population can be supported by web based technologies.