Description A Semantic-based Open Source Platform for Small to Medium CMS ProvidersIKS will raise the semantic capability of European software houses to develop intelligent content management solutions for their customers. What is IKS? IKS is an integrating project targeted at the hundreds of SMEs in Europe, which are providing technology platforms for content and knowledge management to thousands of end user organisations. Downstream, hundred-thousands of corporate end users and millions of content consumers are affected by the quality of service provided through these platforms. The majority of these platforms lack the capability for making use of semantic web enabled, intelligent content, and therefore, lack the capacity for users to interact with the content at the user‘s knowledge level!The major technological result of the project will be the “Interactive Knowledge Stack“, a layered set of software components and specifications which will make traditional content management platforms capable of dealing with the future “Semantic Web“.IKS will close the ...• engineering gap for CMS architectures: the Interactive Knowledge Technology Stack will enable  many open source CMS frameworks to become semantically enabled• research gap on user interaction with knowledge objects: the use of semantics to support direct user interaction with knowledge content will be a focus of Interactive Knowledge• research gap on empirical validation: we involve a group of six technology providers and further 50 smaller CMS/KMS providers for controlled engineering experiments to ensure quantitative analysis of requirements and of subsequent technology validation for semantically enabled, interactive knowledge and content management systems.• ... impact gap for industrial take-up: starting with six industrial partners in the consortium, we will recruit 50 more European CMS/KMS providers and activate a dozen relevant open source communities to embrace IKS specifications, and be present in standards bodies (W3C,OASIS, etc).IKS invites all stakeholders to work towards bringing European CMS/KMS providers to the leading edge of innovation in knowledge technologies, for the benefit of all users.IKS Approach IKS has developed a working hypothesis which we call the Interactive Knowledge Stack. We are trying to start a dialogue in the developer community, about the need for a conceptual layering. As a start, we developed the following concepts, visualized in the diagrams.IKS does not say anything about implementation technology, but it tries to say something about translation from behavioural layers  (at the level of interfaces) to descriptional layers (in the middle) and to distribution and data storage layers (at the level of repository backends).