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          Outlook for AKT project and Edinburgh Site
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Keywords: Knowledge Management, Organisational Modelling, 
          Collaborative working environment, 
          Semantic-based manipulation, Distributed
          Knowledge-based Collaboration. 


For AKT in General 
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In my personal view, the general view for AKT is to produce
a set of techniques that are related to each other and in 
particular, contribute to the area of knowledge management. 
We have tools that allow annotation (Southampton) and keeping 
track of informal discussions (OU). We also develop foundation
work that allows automatic semantic-based manipulation of
knowledge (ourself) and knowledge-based problem solver (Aberdeen). 
As far as to provide an infrastructure to allow information 
flow, Aberdeen and ourself investigate this subject. All of 
the above together provide a foundation for a integrated yet  
virtual knowledge-based working environment for a modern organisation  
that is often distributed itself. 

In the near future, AKT may concentrate its efforts on further
developing and integrating of the above formal work and tools that is
produced in different sites.  For instance, Edinburgh has already
teamed up with OU particularly in concentrating on the semantic-based
manipulation of informal discussion during meetings - this is already
planned in the Co-Akting project. (Edinburgh's work is to provide the
formal base, and OU was to provide the tool.)  Besides such obvious
links, we may further aim ourself to provide a closer tie between all
sites, e.g. to link all tools and formal work that may be used to
serve a knowledge-based distributed environment. One such show case
may be to use AKT as an application area where formal work are used
to support tools and working on real problems.  

For Edinburgh
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Edinburgh consists of several different kinds of talents: GA,
planning, life cycle calculus, process and organisational modelling,
automatic text extraction. One can see the ties between these talents
and talents in other partners. E.g. Stuart (text extraction) is a good
candidate to work with Southampton - using their tool as a front end,
and to support and contrast with the results produced by Soton. Myself   
is a good candidate to work with OU, this will be already happening 
in the co-akting. One other possible candidate is to work with 
Aberdeen under the subject of knowledge sharing and consistency -
I personally have not talk to them about this, but it is a possibility. 
Steve is already planned to work with Aberdeen under the subject of 
infrastructure of a distributed agent system. The domain of multiple 
agent system may also a very good application domain for my business 
process modelling work. 

Next year will be a good year to strength those ties, and work more
closely towards to one application domain, perhaps using AKT
collaboration as an example. As far as Edinburgh is concerned, not
only should we demonstrate ourself closely working with other
partners, we should also demonstrate our own Edinburgh story.   

One show case demo may be that, by carrying out some informal meetings
in Edinburgh, tools will be used to capture information used and
produced during the meeting. This is then represented formally in
several ways, e.g. the iterative cycle of discussion and refinement
may be described in Life Cycle Calculus. The semantics are recorded
formally and understood by the system, which may then act as a
prompter to help the process of discussion - this is supported by the
rationale behind the arguments and an understanding of the domain
(ontology). This work may come from Co-Akting. The goal and process of
such meetings, may be captured and represented in a business process
model. The AKT bus may provide the tool and infrastructure to allow
some of the actual communication to take place.  

Again, the overall picture on the Edinburgh side is to contribute to a 
section of the grander knowledge management life cycle within an
organisation that is supported by semantic-based automation - which is 
currently not provided by current practice of KM. 

For Myself 
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I personally hope that within the next few years, a coherent set of 
enterprise knowledge modelling languages and methods will be
available that are backed by formal methods and semantic-based
manipulations. I also hope that AI methods make a difference to 
current KM practice and becomes what is norm as what SE is today.