Organisations Information and Knowledge Group. Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield.

The Organisations, Information and Knowledge (OAK) Group is part of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield.

We do research on, and provide applications of, Information and Knowledge Technologies for tomorrow's Web, with a particular focus on their use for Knowledge Management.

We build on three key pillars: information, services and the people. People provide information that is the basis for services, which in turn provide new information to people and services.

Requirements for this are:

• a common platform for delivering services and information, i.e. the current and future Internet, accessed with multiple types of devices;
• a large body of information about users and their environment, organisations, intentions and goals.
• the ability easily to define and release services, providing access on demand by the mobile and static population.
• new methodologies and technologies for personalisation of services; this includes adaptation to the device used in accessing the service (e.g. mobile phone as opposed to computer) and customised interfaces, for instance for disabled users

Our activity develops in the following directions:

• study and development of methodologies and technologies for collecting and representing a large-scale information base about social, organisational and geographical environments; this includes technologies and methodologies for acquisition of knowledge and information that:
  • extract knowkedge from large document collections (e.g. Large Scale Mining of Document Repositories and Information Extraction from Documents);
  • interpret user actions and intentions
• study and development of methodologies and technologies for knowledge sharing and Reuse; this includes intelligent methods to search and access dispersed information in large repositories and/or in large distributed organisations;
• user-centred design and evaluation of services and applications.

The group is coordinated by Professor Fabio Ciravegna and is comprised of researchers and PhD students. The group has a spin-out company, K-now Technologies Ltd, that commercialises some of the tools created by our group.

Historically the group was born from the Natural Language Processing Group.