Knowledge, Visualization and Ordering

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

What is KVO?

KVO is about engineering distributed systems using Web-based technologies that support knowledge, visualization and ordering. With the advent of the RQF/ERA in Australia writing journal papers is more encouraged than developing applied systems and this has shifted KVO's research focus. This Web-site is historical as well as current.

In support of knowledge, visualization and ordering, some aspects of natural language processing, knowledge representation, information retrieval, data mining (KDD), usability, knowledge and data modeling techniques are within scope. This is a large palette of techniques but 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 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, FCA and the Web.

Document browsing and information retrieval work with FCA has been ongoing since 1998 and is now known as faceted search. This is still explored in various guises.

A scalable Web accessible knowledge server: Philippe Martin's WebKB and the FCA analysis framework ToscanaJ (developed by Peter Becker and others) were major contributions during the late 90s. More recently Ben Martin's libferris, an XSLT-based virtual file system, has attracted significant interest and continues to grow in importance to 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 collaborate on FCA and virtual file systems. In 2008 both Ducrou and Martin completed their PhDs. Jon Ducrou now works at Amazon in Seattle (as does Richard Cole). Frithjof Dau now works at SAP Research Labs in Dresden. Ben Martin is a freelance opensource developer and consultant based in SE Queensland.

KVO has joint research with Prof. Jon Patrick and the Language and Knowledge Research Lab at Sydney University and the ARC's ARC Network in Human Communication Science.

In 2008, a collaboration with the Australian Museum and the Faculty of Creative Arts at Wollongong aims to build a virtual museum of the South Pacific using FCA. This provides an opportunity to build a new interdisciplinary project team.

Our principle overseas collaboration is with the Forschungszentrum Begriffliche Wissensverarbeitung at the Technical University of Dresden, now the main center for FCA research in Germany since Prof. Wille's retirement in 2004.

Last update 15 Oct, 2008