Although KADS-related research at SWI attracts the most attention, the department as a whole studies a much broader field. A main research area consists of the social and economic impact of information technology. SWI also has a group that specializes in educational systems. This is a typical SWI research area, which heavily intertwines technical aspects, human-computer interaction aspects, and cognitive aspects. In knowledge-engineering research, the emphasis at SWI has shifted over the last few years from modeling reasoning processes to modeling ontologies.
Ontologies are potentially reusable pieces of domain knowledge.
In our view, this area will soon become a prime focus of AI research. The main project at SWI in this area is Kactus, which proposes to develop a number of reusable ontologies for technical systems. Application domains in Kactus include ship design, oil platforms, and electrical service networks. Finally, knowledge management shows promise as another area of research. This follows as a natural progression from the work done at SWI on knowledge modeling and organization analysis.