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The authors investigate how COVID-19 has influenced the amount, type or topics of abuse that UK politicians receive when engaging with the public.

This work covers the first year of COVID-19 in the UK, from March 2020 to March 2021 and analyses Twitter abuse in replies to UK MPs. The authors collected and analysed 17.9 million reply tweets to the MPs. The authors present overall abuse levels during different key moments of the pandemic, analysing reactions to MPs by gender and the relationship between online abuse and topics such as Brexit, the government’s COVID-19 response and policies, and social issues.

The authors have found that abuse levels towards UK MPs were at an all-time high in December 2020. Women (particularly those from non-White backgrounds) receive unusual amounts of abuse, targeting their credibility and capacity to do their jobs. Similar to other large events like general elections and Brexit, COVID-19 has elevated abuse levels, at least temporarily.

Previous studies analysed abuse levels towards MPs in the run-up to the 2017 and 2019 UK General Elections and during the first four months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. The authors compare previous findings with those of the first year of COVID-19, as the pandemic persisted, and Brexit was forthcoming. This research not only contributes to the longitudinal comparison of abuse trends against UK politicians but also presents new findings, corroborates, further clarifies and raises questions about the previous findings.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-07-2022-0392

The paper shows how access to knowledge can be enhanced by using a set of innovative approaches and technologies based on the semantic web.

Emerging trends in knowledge access are considered followed by a description of how ontologies and semantics can contribute. A set of tools is then presented which is based on semantic web technology. For each of these tools a detailed description of the approach is given together with an analysis of related and future work as appropriate.

The tools presented are at the prototype stage but can already show how knowledge access can be improved by allowing users to more precisely express what they are looking for and by presenting to them in a form that is appropriate to their current context.

The tools show promising results in improving access to knowledge which will be further evaluated within a practical setting. The tools will be integrated and trialled as part of case studies within the SEKT project. This will allow their usability and practical applicability to be measured.

Ontologies as a form of knowledge representation are increasing in importance. Knowledge management, and in particular knowledge access, will benefit from their widespread acceptance. The use of open standards and compatible tools in this area will be important to support interoperability and widespread access to disparate knowledge repositories.

The paper presents research in an emerging but increasingly important field, i.e. semantic web‐based knowledge technology. It describes how this technology can satisfy the demand for improved knowledge access, including providing knowledge delivery to users at the right time and in the correct form.

Seeks to explore the gap that exists between knowledge management (KM) systems and the natural language materials that form almost all corporate data stores.

A conceptual discussion and approach are taken using recent scientific results in the fields of the semantic web and ontology‐based information extraction.

Provides a high‐level introduction to information extraction (IE) and descriptions of application scenarios for KM tools that exploit IE, a form of natural language analysis to link semantic web models with documents. The paper presents some examples of ontology‐based IE systems, one of which, KIM, is under development in the SEKT Project. KIM offers IE‐based facilities for metadata creation, storage and conceptual search. The system can be used by diverse applications for annotating and querying documents.

Focuses on technologies and facilities that will become an important part of next‐generation KM applications.