Integrated Semantic Access in Situated Operations

The IS_A project deals with complex mobile operations in the construction and petroleum industries. With the growing availability of wireless networks and sophisticated mobile devices, it is now possible to provide online access to vast amounts of informa tion independently of location and time. For mobile operations, however, it is important to limit the information flow to only the most relevant parts, as both the devices and the nature of mobile work prevents the user from browsing through large amount s of data. A particular challenge of construction and petroleum processes is the need to integrate and relate information of any format and any formality and access this integrated, relevant information on an ad hoc basis. The main objective is to enabl e organizations to run their knowledge-intensive geographically dispersed operations more efficiently by providing a semantic integrated framework for situated multi-modal knowledge access. Semantic Web technologies and standard information retrieval mod els will be used to provide a semantic framework for managing multi-modal information and help users in their mobile operations. The project will investigate ways of extending semantic technologies to model the users? entire mobile work context, includin g his work process and spatio-temporal coordinates. It will then work out strategies for retrieving information, composing information and reason about information to satisfy the information needs explicitly stated by the users or implicitly given by his changing work context. All multi-modal information is given semantic annotations that allow the system to combine text, drawings, audio and other media in the information provided to the users. IS_A is linked to several industrial standardization initi atives and intends to bring the standardization work further by providing methods for building wireless intelligent semantic applications that make use of these ontological standards.