Introduction Hiroyuki Sato / Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. (NTT)

Dear all,

I'm Hiroyuki Sato, a research engineer at NTT Information Sharing
Platform Laboratories. I'm also a member of the Semantic Web Committee
at Interoperability Technology Association for Information Processing,
Japan (INTAP).

I attended first face-to-face meeting as an observer, but from
yesterday I participate in DAWG as a formal member. So let me
introduce myself as a new member.

Our research group is developing tools for gathering and sharing RDF
meta-data which represents background information about electronic
content to enhance intellectual creative work. We call this meta-data
"context"; it is composed of links among various contents, and has the
flexibility to allow users to add descriptions freely. We handle
context as knowledge that is extracted from users’ activities such as
referring to, creating, and reviewing electronic documents.

We are also developing an architecture for sharing the context among
users via peer-to-peer technology. This platform architecture is
called "Context Bureau".
Contexts can be produced by users' activities related to the handling
of content by using various kinds of applications, such as a file
manager or a Web browser and its bookmark editor. Applications, which
have a function that monitors the relationship among contents and maps
it to RDF, communicate with Context Bureau, which also works on the
same user PC. The bureau receives the context from the applications
and stores it using Bureau API. This API also allows applications
to send simple query for the RDF meta-data.
The context bureaus communicate with each other by P2P protocol over
the network. A bureau that is searching for the context of a content
item asks others if they have a context that is related to the same
content. If the bureau finds the context, it shares it with bureaus in
different domains by swapping XML files.

These help users better understand how the existing contents can be
reused by showing context, for example "which content was referred
when it was created" and "who used it and with what".

I'd like to apply sophisticated DAWG specification to our API in the
near future and promote environment for sharing RDF data to provide
various services.

Best regards,
Hiroyuki Sato

Received on Tuesday, 6 July 2004 22:31:42 UTC