The i-KNOW 2011 brings together international researchers (in the English speaking i-Science Track) and practitioners (in the German speaking i-Praxis Track) from the fields of knowledge management and knowledge technologies.

Within the i-Praxis track, the LASSO consortium presented the LASSO approach and the three involved use cases in Session
A LASSO for Linked Data – 3 Use Cases to improve personal knowledge management, document management and creativity techniques by leveraging Linked Data.

Link to the slides on Slideshare.

The LASSO Team has successfully finished the first internal prototype of the Contextualized Semantic Lookup Service, and most of the envisioned functionality is already there!

Correspondingly to a local concept coming from the PoolParty thesaurus management application present in the Use Case Enterprise Collaboration (EC), a lookup to the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud is carried out. The results from the LOD cloud are then ranked according to various algorithms, depending on Use Case and subsequent processing.

The second prototype scheduled for beginning of 2012 will include full integration into the LASSO framework, refined ranking algorithms and improved Linked Open Data cloud support.

The LASSO team has started the work on prototypes for the project partners‘ use cases.

One of the three areas we are working on is the “Enterprise Use Case”, where we eventually want to show that a knowledge model (like a taxnomy or a thesaurus) is a better source of tag and content recommendations when it is aligned with resources from Linked Open Data sources. In order to cost-efficiently create such LOD-aligned thesauri we first focus on algorithms that help thesaurus creators to establish such alignments with thesaurus management tools like PoolParty.

We currently work on services that (semi-)automatically look up and match concepts from a locally stored knowledge model with resources from the LOD cloud. Once a couple of local concepts are matched and anchored with LOD resources, we want to leverage these links in order to semi-automatically populate parts of the local knowledge model with fitting concepts.

We want to demonstrate that the more connections between concepts of the local knowledge model are established with the LOD cloud, the better further concept disambiguation and auto-population becomes. This idea is reflected in the LASSO metaphor: The LASSO is used to catch fitting concepts from the LOD cloud – and the more connections get established, the tighter the grip of the LASSO becomes.

Project LASSO – Lookup & Alignment Service with Semantic Open Data – intends to deploy, improve and extend Linked Data (LD) infrastructure in three different use cases. Central feature of all use cases is a lookup service which helps to augment already existing, fomalized knowledge with facts from the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud.

LASSO is a two-year research project funded by FIT-IT Semantic Systems and Services, a program of the Autrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG).

On Mai 4th, 2010 the official Kick-Off meeting was held in Vienna, Austria. 8 participants from 4 research and technology partners came together to kick start the project and showed their engagement in interestring discussions during the plenary session.