Ontotext contracted by The National Archives of Great Britain

July 26, 2010 - PRLog -- The National Archives has invested in an ‘intelligent discovery tool’ to improve searches of archived UK Government websites. The contract for development of Government Web Archive Semantic Knowledge Base was granted to a consortium of semantic technology professionals lead by Ontotext.

The consortium includes experts from the GATE team at the University of Sheffield, creators of the most comprehensive open-source text mining ecosystem in the world, as well as System Simulation, a major UK integrator of images, digital assets, collection and content management systems. The contract was awarded after a call for competition and a public tender process.

„This is a large-scale, significant project which would increase the value of such an important data base. Public records are of a great practical and cultural importance for different types of users and it is time for the governments to consider how to improve the access to this information. The required technology already exists in the face of data searching and processing semantic systems. That’s why I am glad that Ontotext implements a project for such an important institution, such as the National Archives of Britain and that we have the opportunity to show what the semantic technologies we develop can do to improve the accessibility to such information bases” - said Atanas Kiriakov, head of Ontotext.

The project started in mid June and is expected to finish before the end of March 2011. It will aim to bring new methods of search, navigation and information modeling to The National Archives and in doing so make the web archive a more valuable and popular resource. The Government Web Archive Semantic Knowledge Base will also bring together publicly available linked data and open-source text mining technology in a system, which is easy to understand, and can be managed and extended in a predictable and cost efficient manner.