The rapid progress of the “information society” in the past decade has been made possible by the removal of many technical barriers. Producing, storing, and transporting information in large quantities are no longer significant problems.

Producing on-line, digitized information is no longer a problem. Ever more of our commercial, scientific and personal information exchanges happen on-line in digital form. In the professional domain, near 100% of all office documents are produced in digital form (even if afterwards they are distributed in paper form), large parts of the scientific discourse are now taking place in digital form (with physics, computer science and astronomy taking a leading role). In the public domain, newspapers are available on-line, an increasing number of radio and television stations offer their material on-line in streaming form and e-government is an important theme for public administration. Even in the personal area, information is rapidly moving on-line: sales of digital cameras are now higher then for analogue cameras, e-mail and on-line chat have become important channels for maintaining social relations and for personal entertainment the digital DVD is rapidly replacing the analogue video tape. Compact disk (itself already digital) is under serious pressure from on-line music in MP3 format from a variety of sources. In short: production of on-line information is now the norm in virtually all areas of our life.

Details recent research in areas such as ontology design for information integration, metadata generation and management, and representation and management of distributed ontologies.

Provides decision support on the use of novel technologies, information about potential problems, and guidelines for the successful application of existing technologies.