From SWRC

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology’s Semantic Web Research Center is a research center committed to the study of the next-generation semantic web, and to the development of the basic infrastructural technologies to lead the coming semantic web era, based on technologies such as ontology construction and neuro-scientific artificial intelligence creation that will be the foundation of the future world. Founded in 1998 as the Korea Terminology Research Center For Language And Knowledge Engineering (KORTERM), SWRC was established as the research in terminology and language engineering was expanding into studies advancing the ontology of the next-generation semantic web, including technologies such as inference engines, knowledge portals, and ubiquitous brokers. The center’s immediate objective is to increase the capacity within KAIST to make KAIST the forerunner in the field of semantic web, and to enhance the participation of professors and researchers, in order to develop the center into a representative national and international research organization.

The center conducts multiple research and development projects with the 3 sub-centers, and is working on the development of an information system that promotes the ability of the human brain to accumulate knowledge, by collecting/constructing/maintaining language resources, and improving and standardizing terminologies. Currently, the center is committed to triggering a boom in semantic web and ontology standardization in Korea, and aspires to lead the new generation of semantic information technology, both in Korea and abroad, by standardizing and directly developing various researches, media, and accumulated knowledge to fit the digital era.

The center carries out crucial national tasks, and distributes ontologies and other language resources. It provides the services listed below, and works on the Ministry of Knowledge Economy’s IT infra-service and other technology development projects.

1. The SWRC center is working on the IT infra-service and technology development projects. It conducts research for the successful completion of tasks such as ontology schema construction, service development, and repository development.

2. The SWRC center distributes language resources. Please refer to the following menu for the relevant projects. (Introduction to BORA (Bank of Resource for Language and Annotation))

3. The SWRC center has completed a terminology standardization project, the results of which it has used to develop a search engine for the web terminologies. The service is currently available. (Introduction to the Terminology Management Project)

Goal of our research

Have you ever read Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novel, I, Robot?

Our goal is to create an artificial brain that is similar to what Asimov introduced in his book. To create this brain, an enormous volume of knowledge and information must be transformed into a format that is readable by a machine. Today, the format called “ontology” is the method that is used the most to transform knowledge and information into a form that can be recognized by a machine.

An ontology used in an artificial brain must not only be huge, but also must change continuously in order to adapt to the changes in the external environment. Therefore, the technology that extracts information from common sentences and expands the ontology becomes crucial.

To extract Information from common sentences, a machine learning method is commonly used. Put simply, the technology extracts information from different sentences by analyzing patterns based on the existing data, which is composed of key information already annotated by humans within the common sentences. This data of key information annotated is called a “corpus” or a “language resource”.