OKKAM

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, organisations, events, products, ...) can be integrated into a single virtual, decentralized, open knowledge system.

 

OKKAM will contribute to this vision by supporting the convergence towards the use of a single and globally unique identifier for any entity named on the Web. The intuition of the project is that we must enable tools and practices for cutting to the root the proliferation of unnecessary new identifiers for 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 for them to find public identifiers for the entities named in their contents/services, use them for annotations, new network-based services which make essential use of these identifiers in an open environment (like the Web or large Intranets).

 

Expectations:

Providing a web-scale open service called Entity Name System (ENS) for supporting the systematic reuse of identifiers for "things".

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)

Showcasing the benefits of enabling the Web of Entities in three important areas: information retrieval and semantic search, content authoring (more specifically, in scientific publishing and news production) and organizational knowledge management.