The Scidoc N6 Project

The next version of Vienna Knowledge Net's platform for collaborative research (PCR) is fully based on Semantic Web standards like RDF and OWL. It aims at the integration of traditional functionalities of relational database management systems on the one hand, and knowledge/content management systems on the other. Researchers can continuously develop, enhance and extend their own conceptual domain models and integrate them with existing domain specific or general metadata standards.

The platform provides a comprehensive toolset to manage various kinds of data in close connection with this conceptual meta layer. Structured data with complex relationships as well as semi-structured and unstructured data such as text and multimedia formats can be stored, marked up, searched, analysed, annotated and transformed within a collaborative project environment. Finally the results can be published in the form of searchable databases, document collections, e-zines, thematic portals and made available through existing and emerging standards based distributed research facilities.

The software is being developed under an open source license. Beginning with the first alpha version we will make it available on sourceforge and invite interested parties to join our effort to create a modular, standards based research platform with well defined and documented tool interfaces. Initially, development work will start using the J2EE platform. Eventually, however, we plan to make use of XML based interoperability standards like SOAP/web services to facilitate multi-language development and extensibility.