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State-of-the-art reasoning systems developed in the UoA have underpinned the standardisation of ontology languages, and play a critical role in numerous applications. For example, HermiT, software developed in the UoA, is being used by Électricité de France (EDF) to provide bespoke energy saving advice to 265,000 customers in France, and a roll out of the use of the system to all of their 17 million customers is planned.
Our research has enabled archaeological professional and commercial organisations to integrate diverse archaeology excavation datasets and significantly develop working practices. Commercial archaeological datasets are usually created on a per-site basis structured via differing schema and vocabularies. These isolated information silos hinder meaningful cross search and comparison. As the only record of unrepeatable fieldwork, it is essential that these data are made available for re-use and re-interpretation. As a result of the research, the Archaeology Data Service, English Heritage, the Royal Commissions on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and Wales have published as Linked Data important excavation datasets and national vocabularies that can act as hubs in the web of archaeological data.
The impact of this work stems from the provision of better quality information models, and is manifest via: (a) reduced cost through improved reuse and less rework; (b) improved system interoperability; and (c) enhanced assurance and checking that information requirements are supported by the resultant systems. The approach has been applied in commercial environments, such as Shell (UK), where it has reduced development costs by up to 50% ($1m in one case). It has also been applied in the defence environment, forming a part of underpinning standards currently being implemented by the UK and Swedish Armed Forces.
Aston University researchers developed and maintain the Uncertainty Markup Language (UncertML) for quantitative specification and interoperable communication of uncertainty measures in the Web. It is the only complete mechanism for representation of uncertainty in a web context. UncertML has been:
- Used in policy and decision making by UK (Food and Environment Research Agency) and international (European Commission) government agencies, and many research / industrial institutes;
- Presented at industrial /technical workshops, leading to ongoing international collaborations with bodies such as national space agencies (ESA and NASA) and government data providers;
- Accepted as a discussion paper for formal standardisation by the Open Geospatial Consortium;
- Chosen by independent data providers for efficient sharing of complex information and rigorous risk analysis across scientific domains such as pharmacy, global soil mapping and air quality.
Ontologies are used to describe the meaning of terms in a domain. Manchester has had a leading role in the design of ontology languages, algorithms and tools. Through standardization, algorithm development and tool creation, we have significantly influenced the uptake of the Ontology Web Language (OWL) and Semantic Web Technologies by public service providers and industry. For example, the NCI thesaurus and SNOMED CT are medical terminologies in OWL; specialised semantic web companies such as Clark & Parsia, Racer Systems and TopQuadrant provide semantic technologies and services that build on OWL; and companies such as Oracle and B2i Healthcare include tool support for OWL.
GATE (a General Architecture for Text Engineering—see http://gate.ac.uk/) is an experimental apparatus, R&D platform and software suite with very wide impact in society and industry. There are many examples of applications: the UK National Archive uses it to provide sophisticated search mechanisms over its .gov.uk holdings; Oracle includes it in its semantics offering; Garlik Ltd. uses it to mine the web for data that might lead to identity theft; Innovantage uses it in intelligent recruiting products; Fizzback uses it for customer feedback analysis; the British Library uses it for environmental science literature indexing; the Stationery Office for value-added services on top of their legal databases. It has been adopted as a fundamental piece of web infrastructure by major organisations like the BBC, Euromoney and the Press Association, enabling them to integrate huge volumes of data with up-to-the-minute currency at an affordable cost, delivering cost savings and new products.
Bishop and Danicic contributed to the development of novel spend analysis software. Launched in 2011 as a commercial service by KTP industrial partners @UK PLC, SpendInsight has been used by over 380 organisations, including Basingstoke and North Hampshire NHS Foundation Trust, which, alone, cut procurement spend by £300,000 via savings identified using SpendInsight. An analysis produced by SpendInsight for the National Audit Office identified gross inefficiencies in NHS procurement, yielding potential annual overall savings of at least £500 million. The findings of this report were discussed in parliament and changes to NHS purchasing policy were recommended as a result.
Research on data compression produced novel algorithms that optimise the use of bandwidth and processing power. This research has led to the establishment of a product line that applies these algorithms to video surveillance software, marketed by Digital Barriers plc. Since 2008 this compression technology has allowed the company to grow from 8 to 41 staff and increase revenue from £800K to £6M in 2013. The novelty and usefulness of the data compression research was also appreciated by ThinkAnalytics plc. This led the company to the optimal design for data compression in their recommender system, which is currently being supplied to 130M cable TV customers making the product the most deployed content recommendation system in the market.
Open Data has lowered barriers to data access, increased government transparency and delivered significant economic, social and environmental benefits. Southampton research and leadership has led to the UK Public Data Principles, which were enshrined in the UK Government Open Data White Paper, and has led to data.gov.uk, which provides access to 10,000 government datasets. The open datasets are proving means for strong citizen engagement and are delivering economic benefit through the £10 million Open Data Institute. These in turn have placed the UK at the forefront of the global data revolution: the UK experience has informed open data initiatives in the USA, EU and G8.
Case Based Reasoning (CBR) is well suited to decision support in weak theory domains where important influences and interactions are not well understood. CBR retrieves and reuses similar cases that capture previous decisions, without reasoning about why/how the decision was made. Research at RGU has developed introspective learning technologies to capture knowledge that provides effective case retrieval and reuse in case-based systems. This self-optimised introspective CBR is embedded in a significantly changed process for insurance underwriting at Genworth Financials. Self-optimising retrieval selects relevant cases from Genworth's library of previous insurance cases, to be reused to assist decision-making of underwriters. The manual underwriting process is improved by increasing the consistency of underwriting decisions. Furthermore a 40% improvement in productivity is achieved for handling new insurance customers.