EKOSS, which stands for Expert Knowledge Ontology-based Semantic Search, is a web environment for supporting the sharing and discovery of expert knowledge.
The public EKOSS system is accessible at: www.ekoss.org

Ever feel the frustration that google and yahoo give you nothing but garbage?

The problem is that lists of words with an occasional "and" or "or" thrown in just don't cut it when it comes to trying to explain what you are looking for, particularly when what you are looking for is expertise in some area or knowledge about something.

Some search engines have tried to use natural language processing to get a computer to understand what a human is saying from a natural language sentence. Problem is, computers can't do that (humans have a hard enough time figuring out exactly what the author of a sentence really wants to say!).

So what can we do?

Actually, it turns out that there ARE classes of languages that computers can understand perfectly - they're called ontologies, particularly ontologies based on description logics. These "ontologies" are like simplified versions of the natural languages that you and I speak - simplified in grammar and word meanings so that computers can figure out exactly what it is you are trying to say. Because they are simplified, you won't be writing your life story or poetry in a description logics ontology, but they do a pretty good job of helping you describe something that you are looking for or just what you really mean in general (hence the "description" in description logics). What if instead of trying to force computers to figure out natural language, we could develop a search engine that empowers people to create descriptions and queries in this computer interpretable language? Sounds like the next generation of search engines! And this is what EKOSS is trying to do.

EKOSS provides a set of ontologies formalized in a description logic (the one that is adopted by the W3C).
These ontologies act as semantically rich but computer-understandable knowledge representation languages.
EKOSS also provides a set of authoring tools that people can use to create computer-understandable descriptors, called "semantic statements", of their knowledge resources in the language of one of the provided ontologies.

The following paper gives details regarding the concepts and implementation of the EKOSS knowledge sharing system.

Kraines, Guo, Kemper, Nakamura. 2006. EKOSS: A knowledge-user centered approach to knowledge sharing, discovery and integration on the Semantic Web. 5th International Semantic Web Conference, Athens, GA, USA, November 5-9, 2006, LNCS 4273 (pdf 1891kb)