More about the OKKAM Project

"Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity" [Ockham's razor, XIV century]

"Entity identifiers should not be multiplied beyond necessity" [OKKAM's razor, XXI century]

This is the website of the OKKAM research project, a Large-Scale Integrating Project funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) until June 2010.

The OKKAM project aims at enabling the Web of Entities, namely a virtual space where any collection of data and information about any type of entities (e.g. people, locations, organizations, events, products, ...) published on the Web can be integrated into a single virtual, decentralized, open knowledge base (like the Web did for hypertexts, readhere what Tim Berners-Lee says on this parallel).

OKKAM will contribute to this vision by supporting the convergence towards the use of a single and globally unique identifier for any entity which is named on the Web. The intuition of the project is that the concrete realization of the Web of Entities requires that we enable tools and practices for cutting to the root the proliferation of unnecessary new identifierss for naming the entities which already have a public identifier (the OKKAM's razor). Therefore, OKKAM will make available to content creators, editors and developers a global infrastructure and a collection of new tools and plugins which support them to easily find public identifiers for the entities named in their contents/services, use them for creating annotations, build new network-based services which make essential use of these identifiers in an open environment (like the Web or large Intranets).

To realize this vision, OKKAM proposes the following roadmap:

1. providing a scalable and sustainable infrastructure, called the Entity Name System (ENS), for making the systematic reuse of global and unique entity identifiers not only possible, but easy and straightforward. The ENS will be a distributed service which permanently stores identifiers for entities and provides a collection of core services (e.g. entity matching, ID mapping and resolution) needed to support their pervasive reuse;
2. bootstrapping and enabling the fast growth of Web of Entities by fostering the creation of OKKAMized content (i.e. content where entities are named or annotated with OKKAM IDs) in OKKAM-empowered applications (i.e. applications which can interact with the ENS for getting and reusing identifiers);
3. showcasing the benefits of enabling the Web of Entities and, more in general, of an entity-oriented approach to content and knowledge management by building relevant applications on top of the new infrastructure in three important areas: information retrieval and semantic search, content authoring (more specifically, in scientific publishing andnews production) and organizational knowledge management.
   

The impact of the proposed infrastructure cannot be easily overestimated. Not only it will provide a general service for entity-level integration of virtually any type of data and service into the global Web of Entities; but it will also provide the solid foundation for a whole generation of new applications and services which will benefit from the use of global identifiers in large collections of OKKAMized content and data.

• University of Trento, Italy (Co-Ordinator)
• L3S Research Center, Germany
• SAP Research, Germany
• Expert System, Italy
  
• Elsevier B.V., Netherlands
• Europe Unlimited SA, Belgium
• National Microelectronics Application Center (MAC), Ireland
• Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
• DERI Galway, Ireland
• University of Malaga, Spain
• INMARK, Spain
• Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata (ANSA), Italy