SESAM4 is a Norwegian, national project with the overall goal to make semantic technology understandable and accessible for organisations and small/medium-sized enterprises. The project has run from April 2008 to March 2011.
This portal collects and dissiminates all project results for you. Drilling down into the portal you will find technology primers, educational resources and software which helps you to get started.
A total of 6 demonstrators are available through these pages, ranging from business specific demonstrators in Tourism and Company Market Information to several SPARQL end-points providing specific data-sources for you to try out and query. The project also features an online "OpenBergen" tagger, which let's you upload, analyse and annotate Norwegian texts.
Through its focus on interoperability, common conceptual frameworks and standardised ways for modelling domains, semantic technology offers a competitive advantage to companies that understand how to integrate with these standards. Information on the Internet is, if at all, often published through proprietary interfaces that require a potential user to adapt to different web-services and content representations. Automization of applications against such informaton sources is a pain-staking and difficult process that is both error-prone and expensive due to the unstable, dynamic nature of such implementations.
Standardisation of knowledge representation on the Internet has been a topic of research for many years. Many standards (eg. HTTP, URI, HTML, XML, SOAP) are widely adopted and have significantly contributed to the ways in which information has been exchanged on the web. With the current integration of Smartphones and numerous devices showing good computing power, we find an increasing call for automation of many different, information-intensive tasks. Such tasks depend on a profound and well-defined amount of knowledge being digitally available. Several different knowledge representation languages and schemes have been defined over the years, probably with ISO and W3C standards as the most prominent amongst them.
Sesam4 investigates such standards and methods for how to best apply and utilize them. It does so through the implementation of different software solutions in various application domains. Methodically going through the process of application of semantic technology, the project provides tools, insights and best practice for data conversion, publishing and utilisation.
Brought together under the umbrella of ICT-Norway (IKT-Norge) the consortium consists of renown commercial partners like Computas, Cyberwatcher, TextUrgy, InfoSector, ESIS Norge, Ovitas and academic research partners such as the Western Norwegian Research Institute (WNRI), the Norwegian Computing Center (NR) and Bergen University.
