Research Focus

The Web Engineering and Library Technology (WELT) group at KIZI (one of its four workgroups, overarched by the virtual Knowledge Engineering Group) undertakes education, research and standardization related to web and library data processing.. The focal areas of the group currently are:

• Advancement of various XML- and WWW-related standards
• Introduction of new, especially web-based technologies to the library environment
• Web application ergonomics
• Analysis of properties of web data representation formats

Information science and librarianship had been one of the pillar’s of the KIZI predecessor, Department of Scientific and Technical Information, established as early as 1981. Various classification, cataloguing and query systems were exploited within the Department’s educational and practical activities.

In the end of the 90s, the web became a major topic of education, research and standardization. Expertise in web information publishing has been leveraged (by J. Kosek) in numerous standardization groups, such as W3C XML Core WG, W3C XQuery WG, W3C XSLT WG, W3C ITS IG, W3C HTML WG, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34and OASIS. Standardization of multilingual web technologies led to participation in EU projects PSP MultilingualWeb and FP7 LT-Web. Among the software tools developed in this context, the Relaxed validator (for Relax NG with Schematron patters) and the JNVDL library are used by many external parties. The hot topics in XML and web technologies are regularly discussed during the annual XML Prague international conference.

The two areas, web engineering and library technology, are interconnected both topicwise and personally (especially via Dr. Vilém Sklenák, Head of KIZI, who is active in both areas).