Knowledge, Visualization and Ordering

The SearchSleuth presented at the Concept Lattice Applications Conference in Montpellier, France

What is KVO?

KVO is about involves engineering distributed systems using Web-based technologies that support knowledge, visualization and ordering. With the introduction of the RQF in Australia writing journal papers is now more encouraged than developing and evaluating applied systems and this has shifted KVO's research emphasis. This Web-site is now as much historical as it is current but the visitor will still find some useful resources.

In support of knowledge, visualization and ordering, natural language processing, knowledge representation, information retrieval, data mining (KDD), usability, knowledge and data modeling techniques are all within scope. This makes for a large number of targets and the important unifying theme is the application of conceptual structures in our work: both Sowa's conceptual graphs and Wille's Concept Lattices.

History

The idea of KVO started at the University of Adelaide in 1994 when the unifying application domain was spatial information systems. When Peter Eklund moved to QLD in 1998, KVO affiliated with the DSTC CRC who employed research staff and funded development projects. The lab was also supported from 1995-2001 by contract research. The unifying application theme during this time was document computing using CGs and FCA.

The document browsing and information retrieval work with FCA since 1998 is now called faceted search and was (and still is) explored by Becker, Cole, Ducrou and Eklund in various FCA guises including a commercial tool called MailSleuth. A scalable Web accessible knowledge server: Philippe Martin's WebKB and the FCA analysis framework ToscanaJ (developed by Peter Becker and others) were other major contributions during that time. More recently Ben Martin's libferris, an XSLT-based virtual file system, has attract significant interest and continues to grow in importance in the OpenSource community.

Current Activity

In 2006 Eklund and Amanda Ryan affiliated with the University of Wollongong's Centre for Health Services Development (CHSD). This affliation reactivated an early interest in Medical Informatics that began at the University of Adelaide but also represent a shift towards health informatics as an application domain.

Jon Ducrou and Eklund continue to work on FCA applied to document computing and Frithjov Dau collaborates on the theory of diagrammatic reason and existential graphs: work which has potential to make an impact to description logic. Ben Martin and Eklund continue to collaborate on FCA and virtual file systems.

KVO has joint research with Jon Patrick and the Language and Knowledge Research Lab at Sydney University and the ARC's ARC Network in Human Communication Science. Our principle overseas collaboration is with the Forschungszentrum Begriffliche Wissensverarbeitung at the Technical University of Dresden which is now the main center for FCA research since Prof. Wille's retirement in 2006.

Last update 4 Sept, 2007