The Universal Communication Research Institute (UCRI), NICT conducts research and development on universal communication technologies: multi-lingual machine translation, spoken dialogue, information analysis and ultra-realistic interaction technologies, through which people can truly interconnect, anytime, anywhere, about any topic, and by any method, transcending the boundaries of language, culture, ability and distance. To enhance the universal communication technology, we are trying to develop a large-scale information infrastructure which collects and stores diverse information including huge volumes of web pages from the networks. The one of most important key technologies to realize a large-scaled information infrastructure is a distributed in memory database system. In this paper, we introduced a large-scale information infrastructure, mainly explaining a distributed in-memory database system “okuyama” which is a key technology on our project. We examined the I/O performance of the in memory storage, which verified whether if “okuyama” meet requirements for the infrastructure. Furthermore we give a blueprint of cluster systems on which the infrastructure will be constructed.

This paper proposes a new approach to knowledge management for systematizing expert knowledge especially biological knowledge among domain expert communities. In order to understand high-order biological phenomena, it is necessary to bridge the gap between the amount of information in the molecular level and the amount of information in the cell functional level. However, the biological knowledge in the cell functional level has not been systematized well so far. We have been seeking a method to systematically describe and understand cellular behaviors in morphogenesis and developed a biological database system called CBDB (Cell Behavior Database). CBDB is an ontology-based and community-based semantic data web on cell behaviors in the RDF format with multimedia data (e.g. texts, images and movies). In the effort, 2 biologists and their 28 students collected 1500 cell phenomena extracted from academic journals and text book for 3 years in CBDB. The fact will conduct to the result that our approach enhances efficiency of knowledge systematization of knowledge on cell behavior by professional community. In this paper, we will elaborate the CBDB and discuss the methodology for systematization of cell behavior knowledge by a domain expert community on a different level of expertise.

This paper proposes a general framework for a system with a semantic browsing and visualization interface called Knowledge Communication, Collaboration and Creation Browser (KC3 Browser) which integrates multimedia contests and web services on the grid networks, and makes a semantic mash-up called knowledge workspace (k-workspace) with various visual gadgets according to user's contexts (e.g. their interests, purpose and computational environments). KC3 Browser also achieves a link-free browsing for seamless knowledge access by generating semantic links based on an arbitrary knowledge models such as ontology and vector space models. It assists users to look down and to figure out various social and natural events from the web contents. We have implemented a prototype of KC3 Browser and tested it to an international project on risk intelligence against natural disaster.

This paper proposes a general framework of for a system with a semantic browsing and visualization interface called Knowledge Communication, Collaboration and Creation Browser (KC3 Browser) integrates multimedia contests and web services on the grid networks, and makes a semantic mash-up called knowledge workspace (k-workspace) with various visual gadgets according to user's contexts (e.g. their interests, purpose and computational environments).

The aim of this study is to develop a new communication protocol which has the same characteristics of natural language in terms of providing flexible communication. In this paper, we describe how natural language-based protocol is developed as a computer communication protocol and the mechanism of the communication.

Our research aims at developing a language-based operating system (LOS) as the framework of Everyday Language Computing which imitates language-based intelligence created by the human brain. In this paper, we propose a new approach to computer resource management and manipulation by everyday language to realize LOS. We explain our approach to dealing with the meaning of language, the architecture of the language operating system and its components. In particular, we describe the notion of language application, language protocol and its resource representation (i.e., semiotic base), compared to the other protocols and their resource representations. We argue that by processing meaning of language rather than processing information, we attempt to provide a more human-like computer system and an intelligent computational environment to all people.

The long-term goal of the Knowledgeable Community project is to develop a computational framework for facilitating the knowledge process by humans and computers. We model the knowledgeable community as an open system of natural and artificial agents interacting in knowledgeable environments where real or virtual entities are associated with conceptualization. First, we study associative representation based on information representation with variable degrees of formality which permits raw information materials to be incrementally formalized into a well-defined system of knowledge and even incomplete knowledge pieces to be accessed and utilized by humans and computers. Second, we present the aspect theory for describing the world from multiple perspectives and its application to ontology-based intelligent document base system for human knowledge sharing. Third, we describe a computational framework using agent development, ontology-grounding, and ontology-based mediation. We have implemented several complete prototypes which can demonstrate the significance of our idea. Experimental evaluation is in progress.

Engineers have to refer to various technical information to perform their job. Technical information have been accumulated in an electronic form as documents which contain texts, pictures and movies in enterprises. However, it needs expert knowledge to make use of these technical information. In this paper, we describe an ontology-centric framework, called intelligent corporate base (ICoB) which organizes a technical information into documents, assists a comprehension of documents and helps share information. We explain a prototype system for planning on repair work of transformers. Furthermore, we describe development and use of ontology for technical information sharing.