Kuala Lumpur, 9 January 2009 – MIMOS and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), via its research entity The Montpellier Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics, and Microelectronics (LIRRM), yesterday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to their collaboration for the development of Semantic Technology platforms.

“Semantics Technology holds great promise to solve corporation’s biggest nightmares and managing customer information is just one good example of the kind of service that could prove semantic technology’s promise. It has the potential to deploy intelligence into applications for across verticals including business and financial; agriculture; medical; automotive; and public safety,” said Dr Dickson Lukose, Head, Knowledge Technology Cluster, MIMOS.

The ICT market space for Semantics Technology between 2006 and 2015 is projected at USD283B. Whilst the technology’s market share in 2006 was USD2B, in 2010 it is expected to rise to USD52B, with the Asian market taking up the share at USD12.6B.

Ultimately, the collaboration between MIMOS and CNRS is expected to result in positioning MIMOS as a leading applied research center in Semantic Technology in line with MIMOS’ mission to grow globally competitive indigenous industries.

MIMOS Semantic Technology Platform
MIMOS is collaborating with various foreign universities and organizations to drive the Semantic Technology industry for the nation in its efforts to ensure Malaysia is recognised as the first Web 3.0 society in the world.

MIMOS currently is in collaboration with the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Germany; KNOW-CENTRE, University Technology Graz, Austria; Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong; University Montpellier II, France; University of Calgary, Canada; Franz Inc., USA; Vivomind Inc., USA; and Knowledge Networks Inc, Australia to develop semantic technology platforms.

MIMOS has also established a Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Semantic Technology, in collaboration with local and foreign universities and industry players, aimed at enhancing the utilization of ontology and Semantic Web technologies to automate the collection, modeling, organization and retrieval of knowledge. MIMOS has also established a joint research lab at University Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) and is specifically working with UNIMAS’ Faculty of Cognitive Science and Human Development, and Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, as well as with University Malaysia Sabah (UMS) School of Engineering and Information Technology.

Semantics is the study of meaning; while Semantic Technologies include software standards and methodologies that are aimed at providing more explicit meaning for the information at one’s disposal. Semantic technology enables computers to achieve a higher degree of ‘understanding’ the meaning of the information they process; thereby providing users with better opportunities to navigate through the vast amount of information and to find facts in unlimited volumes of documents, Internet resources and services.