About
KMi Planet was designed as a web-based news server to enhance communication within the laboratory and provide the wider community with access to lab-related news. Unlike typical personalised news feed projects, KMi Planet focused on replicating newsroom functionality. Its primary goal was to reduce the overhead for lab members when submitting stories, encouraging them to write and share their own news while reading others’ stories.
To achieve this, the team developed a news server that accepted story submissions via email, simplifying the process. The subject line of the email became the headline, and the body became the story text, with attached images automatically placed in the appropriate section. This approach eliminated technical pressures on contributors, allowing them to focus on content.
The system proved successful, attracting a variety of story submissions from lab members and gaining popularity with visitors for providing an immediate view of lab activities. As its usage grew, additional versions of Planet were developed, incorporating intelligent agents, knowledge modeling, and personalised services.
Originally designed and developed by John Domingue in January 1997, KMi Planet was partially inspired by work on the Lens Project at Apple Technologies Group by Stephanie Houde and Rachel Bellamy. In July 2001, the system was re-implemented by Trevor Collins in Perl, using a MySQL database developed with Kevin Quick, Peter Scott, and Stuart Watt. KMi news still runs today with 1-2 stories posted each week.
Team
Trevor Collins
John Domingue
Kevin Quick
Peter Scott
Publications
Domingue, J. and Scott, P. (1998) KMi Planet: Putting the Knowledge Back into Media. In Eisenstadt, M. and Vincent, T. The Knowledge Web: Learning and Collaborating on the Net, Kogan Press pp. 173-184.
Domingue, J. and Scott, P. (1998) KMi Planet: A Web Based News Server. Asia Pacific Computer Human Interaction Conference (APCHI’98), Shonan Village Centre, Hayama-machi, Kanagawa, Japan, 15-17 July, 1998.
Domingue, J. and Motta, E. (1999) A Knowledge-Based News Server Supporting Ontology-Driven Story Enrichment and Knowledge Retrieval. Submitted to the 11th European Workshop on Knowledge Acquisition, Modelling, and Management (EKAW ’99).
Domingue, J. and Motta, E. (2000) Planet-Onto: From News Publishing to Integrated Knowledge Management Support. IEEE Expert Systems Special Issue on Knowledge Management and Distribution over the Internet. May/June 2000, pp. 26-32.
Motta, E., Buckingham Shum, S. and Domingue, J. (2000) Ontology-Driven Document Enrichment: Principles Tools and Applications. International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 52(5) pp. 1071-1109. Available in PDF format.
Kalfoglou, Y., Domingue, J., Motta, E., Vargas-Vera, M. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2001) myPlanet: an ontology-driven Web-based personalised news service. In The Proceedings of the IJCAI’01 workshop on Ontologies and Information Sharing. Available in PDF format.
