Introduction of the 21st Century COE Program “Framework for Systematization and Application of Large-scale Knowledge Resources”

This paper describes the new five-year COE program “Framework for Systematization and Application of Large-scale Knowledge Resources,” that has recently been launched at Tokyo Institute of Technology. The project is conducting a wide range of interdisciplinary research combining humanities and technology to create a framework for the systematization and the application of large-scale knowledge resources in electronic forms. Spontaneous speech, written language, materials for e-learning and multimedia teaching, classical literature and historical documents, as well as information on cultural properties are just some examples of the real knowledge resources being targeted by the project. These resources will be systematized according to their respective semantic structures. Pioneering new academic disciplines and educating knowledge resource researchers are also objectives of the project. Large-scale systems for computation and information storage, as well as retrieval, have already been installed to support this research and education.