Through a job announcement of STI Innsbruck I was made aware of the LarKC project.

To quote the job announcement:

Current Semantic Web reasoning systems do not scale to the requirements of their hottest applications, such as analyzing data from millions of mobile devices, dealing with terabytes of scientific data, and content management in enterprises with thousands of knowledge workers.

The Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC, for short, pronounced “lark”), a platform for massive distributed incomplete reasoning will remove these scalability barriers. This will be achieved by:

• Enriching the current logic-based Semantic Web reasoning methods with methods from information retrieval, machine learning, information theory, databases, and probabilistic reasoning,
• Employing cognitively inspired approaches and techniques such as spreading activation, focus of attention, reinforcement, habituation, relevance reasoning, and bounded rationality.
• Building a distributed reasoning platform and realizing it both on a high-performance computing cluster and via “computing at home”.

The project consortium is an interdisciplinary team of engineers and researchers in Computing Science, Web Science and Cognitive Science, well qualified to realize this ambitious vision. The Large Knowledge Collider will be an open architecture. Researchers and practitioners from outside the consortium will be encouraged to develop and plug in their own components to drive parts of the system. This will make the Large Knowledge Collider a generic platform, and not just a single reasoning engine.

What more shall I say than: Way to go LarKC!

I tried to figure out some additional information about the project.

What I’ve found is this blog entry. A colleague of mine discovered a presentation given at a workshop.

After some silent time in the field of information retrieval in the semantic web, search in the next generation web seems to be an upcoming topic in different research communities. Recently two calls for papers have been posted. Both are CFPs from workshops. One is hosted on the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) the other one is hosted the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR).

If you are interested in research related to information retrieval / search and semantic web you might be interested in these two meetings:

• Semantic Search 2008 Workshop
• Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval