Information management and knowledge sharing in WIDE

WIDE is an IST project whose aim is to investigate the use of emerging SemanticWeb technologies, tools, and standards in the support of effective knowledge sharing and information management in real multi-disciplinary activities, such as innovative product design. This paper presents the approach to knowledge sharing and information support that has been developed and adopted by the WIDE product, the information system architecture that is being developed to test both this approach, and the Semantic Web techniques that are used in its implementation, some early results from the project, and a discussion of related work in information systems and Semantic Web techniques and tools.