Building semantic applications with SEKT

SEKT (http://www.sekt-proiect.com) has now completed almost two years of its three year project life. Its goal is to enable semantic knowledge management. This means the management and utilisation of information based on its underlying meaning rather than the particular form of words used to express that meaning. It means also unified access to heterogeneous data sources, which employ different terminology and are classified with different schemas. A great deal of software has been created and integrated into the SEKT architecture. This software is now available to be used during the last year of the project (2006) in the three case studies and is also available for wider use. This paper describes the motivation for the project, the technologies which enable it, the architecture and components which have been developed, and the case studies. It finishes by discussing some additional applications, beyond the current case studies, which could benefit from semantic knowledge technology.