Information Management Group Profile
(Manchester, UK)

People

• Alvaro Fernandes
• Carole Goble (Prof.)
• Ian Horrocks (Prof.)
• Norman Paton (Prof.)
• Rizos Sakellariou
• Uli Sattler

Description:

The Information Management Group (IMG) is run by Prof. Carole GOBLE and Prof. Norman PATON, and conducts research into the design, development and use of data and knowledge management systems. Challenging applications motivate and validate our research, in particular the Semantic Web and e-Science. The group currently comprises 5 academic staff, 17 research staff and 13 research students. The current IMG research programme is supported by grants with a total value of around 3 million ukp from a wide range of sources, including the UK Research Councils (EPSRC, BBSRC), the EU, the Wellcome Trust, US DARPA, the DTI and industry. The group has strong industrial links with major companies including AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, IBM, Oracle and Sun Microsystems, and SMEs such as geneticXchange. In addition to collaborating with established companies, the group has been connected with the establishment of two start-up companies: Sagitus Solutions and Network Inference (which recently acquired $4 million in Venture Capital from Nokia Ventures). IMG plays a leading role in standardisation and industrial forums, as leading members of the W3C Semantic Web activity and co-chairs of working groups of the pharmaceutical/biotech industrial forum I3C and the Global Grid Forum. Members of the group sit on a wide range of UK and international government and community funding and policy forming committees.

Of particular interest are the Semantic Web and e-Science and Ontologies, Representation, Reasoning and Development research areas. The Semantic Web is the next generation Web - a web for machines as well as people. The UK e-Science programme is to Science as e-Commerce is to business - except that global science simply cannot be done without in silico experiments over databases, using simulations and sharing knowledge. e-Science is grounded in the Grid movement - the next generation Internet. The IMG is a leader and shaper in both these movements. For example, we are core members of the EU OntoWeb Thematic Network, sit on the Semantic Web Science Foundation, and are members of the EU-NSF Joint committees on semantic web services and web ontology languages. We bring them together in the Semantic Grid, (http://www.semanticgrid.org) co-chairing the GGF research group. The EU IST WonderWeb project (http://wonderweb.semanticweb.org) is developing the infrastructure necessary for building the Semantic Web, extending our groundbreaking work on ontology development environments and ontology deployment. The OilEd ontology editor, for example, has exceeded 2000 downloads (http://oiled.man.ac.uk). The COHSE hypermedia system (http://cohse.semanticweb.org) links web pages based on their reasoning over their conceptual ontological content rather then hard-wired links - this work is now funded by Sun Microsystems. Related work includes ProXimity, a means of situating hypermedia links in the physical environment, which follows on from our award winning work on web accessibility for the visually impaired in the TOWEL project. Ontologies are essential components of knowledge management systems, distributed computing environments such as Web Services, and applications such as e-Commerce and e-Science. The group has an international reputation for its work in ontologies, ontology languages and reasoners, melding theory and practice in the design and implementation of practical systems based on provably correct algorithms. The group specialises in work on the theory and practice of highly optimised and expressive Description Logics - the logics that form the foundation of the Semantic Web ontology languages DAML+OIL and the W3C‹s OWL Web Ontology Language. The group has a leading role in the international development of these languages. FaCT, a highly optimised description logic reasoning system, is widely recognised as having revolutionised the design of description and modal logic reasoners, making these new ontology languages feasible. FaCT is used for reasoning with knowledge bases, ontologies and database schemata. This reasoner, imitated by all modern Description Logic systems, forms the heart of many of the tools and systems the group is involved in, and is being commercialised by our spin-off company Network Inference. We continue to build the infrastructure needed for the development and deployment of ontologies in advanced information systems in medical informatics, bioinformatics and hypermedia.

Lab Website:

http://img.cs.man.ac.uk/