Welcome to the web site of the OKKAM Large-Scale Integrating Project (GA#215032)

This is the website of the OKKAM research project, an Integrated Project funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) until 2010.

The OKKAM project aims at enabling the Web of Entities, a global virtual space for publishing and managing information and knowledge about entities. The Web of Entities will be the result of enabling the smooth integration of decentralized information sources, made possible by supporting the use (and reuse!) of global unique identifiers for entities: ideally, the same thing will be referred to by the main ID anywhere on the Web or large organizational networks.

To implement this vision, OKKAM proposes the following approach:

1. providing a scalable and sustainable infrastructure for the Web of Entities, called an Entity Name System (ENS), based on the systematic reuse of global entity identifiers. Its backbone will be a large-scale, distributed Entity Repository, which will store global identifiers for entities and will offer the core services (e.g. entity matching) needed to support their reuse across any domain and in principle any type of format and application
2. bootstrapping and enabling the fast growth of Web of Entities by fostering the creation of OKKAMized content (i.e. content where entities are named or annotated with OKKAM IDs) in OKKAM-empowered applications (i.e. applications which can interact with the ENS for getting and managing OKKAM IDs)
3. showcasing the benefits of enabling the Web of Entities and, more in general, of an entity-oriented approach to content and knowledge management by building relevant applications on top of the new infrastructure in three important industries: scientific publishing, news production and organizational knowledge management.
   

The impact of the proposed infrastructure cannot be easily overestimated. Not only it will provide a general service for entity-level integration of virtually any type of data and service into the global Web of Entities; but it will also provide the solid foundation for a whole generation of new applications and services which will benefit from the use of global identifiers in large collections of OKKAMized content and data.

• University of Trento, Italy (Co-Ordinator)
• L3S Research Center, Germany
• SAP Research, Germany
• Expert System, Italy
  
• Elsevier B.V., Netherlands
• Europe Unlimited SA, Belgium
• National Microelectronics Application Center (MAC), Ireland
• Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
• DERI Galway, Ireland
• University of Malaga, Spain
• INMARK, Spain
• Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata (ANSA), Italy