Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
This page contains answers to frequently asked questions about the LarKC project. The questions are grouped by category and are expected to increase in number as the project matures and the consortium gains experience.
1. General
1.1. What is LarKC?
LarKC (pronounced "lark") stands for the "Large Knowledge Collider". LarKC is a project that aims to develop a platform for massive distributed incomplete reasoning that will remove the scalability barriers of currently existing reasoning systems for the Semantic Web. More information can be found here: http://www.larkc.eu/
1.2. How is LarKC funded?
LarKC is funded by the European Union Framework 7 program, project number: FP7 - 215535
1.3. Why LarKC?
Current Semantic Web reasoning systems do not scale to the requirements of their hottest applications, such as analyzing data from millions of mobile devices, dealing with terabytes of scientific data, and content management in enterprises with thousands of knowledge workers. LarKC will be a platform for massive distributed incomplete reasoning that will remove these scalability barriers. This is achieved by
- enriching the current logic-based Semantic Web reasoning methods
- employing cognitively inspired approaches and techniques
- building a distributed reasoning platform and realizing it both on a high-performance computing cluster and via "computing at home"
The combined technologies of LarKC will move beyond the state-of-the-art of Webscale reasoning.
1.4. What can one do with LarKC?
1.5. What research topics are addressed?
1.6. What use-cases are planned?
2. Getting information
2.1. Where can I find further information?
Further information of a general nature can be found by visiting the LarKC homepage at http://www.larkc.eu/
Announcements of important LarKC events/milestones, as well as advances in LarKC-related areas, can be found on the LarKC blog: http://blog.larkc.eu/
Intra-consortium actvities, progress, documentation, plans, etc can be found on the shared wiki: http://wiki.larkc.eu/
2.2. Who should I contact for general information?
STI Innsbruck are the project coordinators. Please contact Alice Carpentier for further information.
2.3. Who should I contact for technical information?
Please contact Frank van Harmelen who is the project scientific officer from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
3. Technical
3.1. How was LarKC designed?
3.2. What are the categories of LarKC components?
Simply speaking, LarKC consists of a 'platform' that provides an environment to execute 'plug-ins'. There are different categories of plug-ins and these can be assembled in to a 'pipeline', where the output of each plug-in feeds in to the input of the next plug-in in sequence.
The categories of plug-in are:
Identify - Identify resources that may be useful for the given query/search request.
Transform - Convert from one formalism to another. This could be as simple as converting from one RDF representation to another, e.g. facebook to FOAF ontology, or something more fundamental, such as converting from natural language to RDF.
Select - Take a subset of possible input using heuristics, statistics or any other strategy.
Reason - Perform inference to materialise the implicit knowledge present.
Decide - Control plug-in behaviour to expedite the efficient functioning of the pipeline and ultimately to decide when to terminate.
3.3. How do I get LarKC?
The first public release of LarKC will be in May 2009. Instructions on where to download it will appear here.
3.4. How do I install and run LarKC?
Please see the installation section of the getting started manual.
4. Developer
4.1. What development tools/technologies are required?
LarKC is being developed using Java SDK 1.6, although other technologies are possible. Some plug-ins have been developed that wrap externally available Web services, e.g. sindice for finding RDF documents on the Web.
4.2. How do I create a new Plug-in
Please see the getting started manual.
4.3. Where can I find the LarKC source code?
The latest source code for the platform and plug-ins can be checked-out from the project SVN repository (https://larkc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/larkc/trunk/platform) and (https://larkc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/larkc/trunk/plugins) using any SVN client.
Note: For further instructions on how to access the repository, please visit http://wiki.larkc.eu/LarkcProject/WP5/LarKC-SourceForge