Component-based knowledge engineering architecture

The Integrated Knowledge Engineering Architecture (IKEA) project underway at Ewha Womans University is a five-year, large-scale advanced research and development (R&D) project aimed at pushing the frontier of knowledge engineering technology. The project provides a single focus for almost all of the faculty members and their graduate students in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Ewha Womans University, the women's university with the longest history and tradition of excellence in Korea. We envision knowledge engineering (KE) as the new dimension being added to information technology (IT) infrastructure, on which the daily business of corporations, government agencies, and educational institutes depends in today's client/server, Internet era. The primary components of KE technology include relational database systems, data warehousing systems, decision support and multidimensional data analysis systems, data mining and knowledge discovery systems, Internet XML/HTML document content search mechanisms, and industry-specific applications of data analysis and data mining systems. The objectives of the IKEA project are to address various major open research subjects in each of these areas and to put together a Knowledge Engineering Architecture platform using component-based software development technology. We envision the knowledge engineering architecture to be used in supporting "knowledge" applications such as database marketing, fraud detection, personalized electronic commerce, customer relationship management, etc. The IKEA project requires participation from at least six major subdisciplines, including databases, knowledge discovery and reasoning (statistics and artificial intelligence), visualization and human-computer interface, parallel processing, networking and distributed systems, and software engineering.