About

John Domingue and Enrico Motta introduced KMi Planet, a web-based news server designed to enhance communication within their laboratory and provide access to lab-related information for the broader community. The server had been operational for nearly three years and housed over a hundred stories. Its success led to several knowledge management challenges, including the need for effective semantic search and knowledge retrieval, individualised presentations and news alerts, and the emulation of a newsroom team’s behaviour. In response, they developed an integrated suite of tools named PlanetOnto, which enabled ontology-driven document formalisation and enhanced browsing and search capabilities with deductive knowledge retrieval. The PlanetOnto architecture featured specialised agents that offered personalised news feeds and alerts, proactively identifying potentially interesting news items. PlanetOnto was a contribution to the Semantic Web which was taken up by big tech companies such as Google in the early 2010s to drive search and discovery services.