Although its main purpose is to improve mutual awareness among the Czech researchers themselves, I hope it will also be of some use for foreign researchers in the above areas, who seek scientific partners or just wonder whom to meet while visiting the Czech Republic. If you wish to receive information on forthcoming events or significant updates of this page, please, let me know.

The following "definitions" are very simplified and subjective; their role is to clarify the relations among the three areas.

• Applied ontology (as discipline) is a subarea of knowledge engineering inspired by the philosophical notion of ontology. Its goal is to develop ontologies (as artefacts). An ontology is most often understood as formal, explicit representation of shared conceptualisation for a certain domain. Although ontologies have been around for more than ten years, they only became widely popular in the last few years, in connection with the proliferation of WWW. They are expected to provide meaning for logical facts presented at the...
• ...semantic web. The idea of semantic web is to use the WWW infrastructure to share not only documents/data readable by humans but also logical facts (knowledge annotations). Software agents could apply inference procedures on these facts, and derive new facts from them. The first concept of semantic web relied on authors themselves annotating their web pages. Currently, a more promising approach seems to be to create the annotations semi-automatically, by means of...
• ...web information extraction. Information extraction was previously used for identification of important concepts (such as names of people or companies) in free text (e.g. of news articles); the results were mostly stored in a relational database. In the web environment, extraction methods have to account for HTML tags, and also cope with heterogeneous writing habits of page authors.

For start-up links on applied ontology see e.g. the Laboratory for Applied Ontology.

For start-up links on semantic web see e.g. the Semantic Web Community Portal or the Semantic Web Activity page at W3C.

For start-up links on web information extraction see e.g. the Web IR & IE page.

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If you feel that your organisation/project is missing in the table, please, e-mail to svatek@vse.cz

Organisation	Workgroup	Project	Contact	Areas	Topics
University of Economics, Prague	Knowledge Engineering Group	K-Space (EU IST, NoE)	V.Svatek	WIE, SW, AO	Discovery, representation and reasoning over semantics in multimedia.
		KP-Lab (EU IST, IP)	V.Sklenak (mail)	WIE, SW, AO	Semantic retrieval and knowledge mining in eLearning environment.
		MedIEQ (EU Public Health, STREP)	V.Svatek	WIE, SW	Automatic extraction and semantic representation of quality indicators from medical web pages.
		M-CAST (EU eContent SSA)	V.Sklenak (mail)	AO	Multi-lingual text retrieval based on terminological ontology.
		Rainbow (project partly suspended)	V.Svatek	WIE, SW, AO	Semantic annotation via information extraction, RDF storage and retrieval, semantic web services, ontology learning.
		LISp-Miner	J. Rauch (coordinator), V.Svatek (for the part of project related to OntoWeb-CZ)	AO	Ontology design patterns, ontologies as prior knowledge for KDD.
		Knowledge Web (EU IST, NoE)	V.Svatek	AO, SW	Ontology alignment, semantic web services.
Czech Technical University	Gerstner Lab., Agent Technology group		M.Obitko	AO, SW	Ontologies (OWL) in Multi-Agent Systems.
	Gerstner Lab., Information and Knowledge-Based Systems group	CIPHER (EU IST) (project ended)	Z.Kouba	AO, SW	Ontologies (OCML) for cultural heritage applications, temporal ontologies, ontology transformations.
	Department of Computer Science and Engineering	KSMSA (incl. browser of the SUMO ontology) (project ended)	M.Sevcenko	AO	Upper-level ontologies and WordNet; knowledge-intensive support of modeling and simulation of dynamic systems
		WEBING	M.Svihla	SW	Ontology-based transformation of relational databases to RDF
Academy of Science	Institute of Computer Science	SEMWEB	J.Stuller	SW	Data/information integration, agent technology, soft computing for semantic web.
Charles University	Dept. Software Engineering	SEMWEB	J.Pokorny	SW	Data/information integration.
	Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics		J.Hajic	SW	Lexical Semantics, Natural Language.
Masaryk University, Brno	NLP Lab	Balkanet (project ended), SEMWEB	K.Pala	AO, SW	NLP incl. WordNet (as 'terminological ontology').
		Visual Browser	Z.Neverilova	SW	RDF visualisation.
		OLE	V. Novacek	AO, SW, WIE	Ontology learning from text, uncertainty in ontologies.
Brno University of Technology	Dept. of Computer Graphics and Multimedia		P.Smrz	AO, SW, WIE	Semantics in texts and multimedia, ontology learning.
	Dept. of Information Systems		R.Burget	WIE	Information extraction from hierarchical HTML structures.
		(project ended)	J.Guttner	SW	Semantic web and object-oriented databases.
Technical University of Ostrava	Dept. of Computer Science, ARG group		V.Snasel	WIE	XML indexing as support for WIE.
	Dept. of Computer Science, LABIS group		M.Duzi	AO, SW	natural-language-oriented knowledge representation languages with high expressive power.
Ginger Alliance (software company)		PerlRDF	P.Cimprich (mail)	SW	RDF tools (parser, storage, query language)
(independent developer)		MindRaider	M. Dvorak	AO, SW	Mind mapping based on SW-related technologies; cognition visualization; semantic desktop(s) integration

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In this section, I try to list forthcoming and recent events related to the topic areas, in the Czech Republic. If you know of any other, please, let me know.

Beside irregular events listed below, note a high number of regular seminars that occasionally touch the topic areas. You can have a look at the list maintained on the page of the KEG seminar (bottom part). Although the list itself is in Czech, many of the seminars have a page in English.

Forthcoming:

• On June 18-22, an Intensive course : Ontological Foundations for Conceptual Modeling with Applications was held at University of Economics, Prague (see announcement in Czech), by Giancarlo Guizzardi.

Recent:

• All areas covered by OntoWeb-Cz were topical for the annual Znalosti ("Knowledge") conference.
• The 15th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2006), the most traditional European Knowledge Engineering event, was held in Podebrady in October 2006.

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