Exmo is an INRIA team studying the communication of formalised knowledge mediated by computers. In the communication between people, a computer can add value to its medium and memory functions by performing advanced operations such as formatting, filtering, categorising, consistency checking, or generalising. Ensuring the suitability and intelligibility of knowledge for the users requires to develop an abstract understanding of representations and the transformations applied to them.
The goal of Exmo is the development of theoretical and software tools for qualifying the manipulation of knowledge chunk. It is focussed on the transformations that can be applied to knowledge and the properties of these transformations.
We are studying structural, semantic and semiotic properties of transformations (like order or consequence preservation). Our emphasis is curently on three topics: semantic properties in knowledge representation language translation, semantic adaptation of multimedia documents and model alignment for interoperability.
We developped a language and tool for combining structural transformations (on XML encoded representations) which is the main support for experiments. This work is naturally applied in the context of semantic web infrastructure (when one needs to import pieces of knowledge from other contexts: languages, ontologies) and transformation system engineering (when one wants to establish properties of a complex transformation flow).
Transmorpher, a tool for defining and processing complex transformations of XML documents.