A C-Web is a distributed repository of resources and of documents, collaboratively built and used by a given community who shares knowledge related to an identified domain. Compared to the classical World-Wide-Web, a C-Web is managed and structured : data and document-elements are linked by typed relations , and are gathered into classes, forming , describing or instantiating more or less general concepts.
The project C-Web is aiming at designing a generic and open technology that will tend to bridge the traditional gaps that exist beetween data, documents and knowledge. Altough, the complete research is planed on four years from 2000 to 2003, the present project is limited to the "Feasibility assessment phase" to be carried out dyring the first year.
The first phase includes two technical tasks, in addition to project management and outreach. The first task is to identify what are the key services expected by "virtual communities", what are the main potential markets for the target product and what should be the core functionality of the platform. The work will be done in close collaboration with representatives of several other communities which are already active users of current web technologies, e.g.: art historians, software engineers, or other stuff working in "knowledge intensive" businesses for which group-cooperation is normal practice. The second task is to identify relevant technologies and methodologies that could eventually be used and intergrated in a generic C-Web platform and to design the general system architecture.
Two of the most important features of a C-Web schema are its modularity and extensibility: a C-Web schema can at any moment be enriched by new concepts and relations, existing concepts can be refined, the terminology used to name concepts and relations can be enriched by new linguistic variants.
This first-phase project will provide a clear understanding of the expectations and requirements of deverse users'communities regarding "inelligent" web services. Two ERCIM partners are currently active in the project : INRIA, and ICS-FORTH.
European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM)French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA)
