Exmo anticipates that, in future information systems, formalised knowledge will be exchanged routinely by computers. During the communication process, the computer can add value to its medium and memory roles by processing formatting, filtering, categorising, generalising or checking consistency. This approach is gaining ground through the generalisation of standard exchange languages such as XML. Consequently, users will need better warranties on the performed manipulations. Exmo aims at developing theoretical and software tools for helping the exchange of formalised knowledge chunks.
Our main research standpoint is the study of properties that must be satisfied by the transformations run against the formalised representations. Among these properties are content or structure preservation, source trackability or, conversely, secrecy. We want to elaborate a "general theory of transformations" based on properties satisfied by transformations rather than the transformations themselves.
The anticipated applications are transformation system engineering (where a transformation flows is a particular organisation of transformations) and technologies for a "semantic web".