OpenKnowledge
Proposal extract
Description of the project
OpenKnowledge provides a novel form of peer to peer knowledge sharing in open environments,
using interaction model routing; context maintenance; dynamic ontology matching and
visualisation to avoid scaling problems found in traditional systems.
Impact
We shall provide a unifying framework based on interaction models that are mobile in the
sense that they may be transferred to other components, this being a mechanism for Web service
composition and for coalition formation. A key contribution of OpenKnowledge is to demonstrate
that by shifting the emphasis to interaction (the details of which may be hidden from users)
we can obtain knowledge sharing of sufficient quality for sustainable communities of practice
without the barrier of complex meta-data provision prior to community formation.
OpenKnowledge's main innovation
The existing, open Worldwide Web has been successful on a global scale because the cost of
participation at a basic level is low and the individual benefit of participation is immediate,
rising rapidly as more participants take part. The same cannot currently be said about
semantic based systems because the cost of being precise about semantics for sophisticated
components is prohibitively high and the cost of ensuring an individual, absolute semantics
for a component rises rapidly as more participants take part. OpenKnowledge aims to break out
of this deadlock by focusing on semantics related to interaction (which are acquired at low
cost during participation) and using this to avoid dependency on a priori semantic agreement;
instead making semantic commitments incrementally at run time. The "Open" in OpenKnowledge
thus is significant in two senses: it assumes an open system, which anyone can join at any
time; it assumes an openness to being joined, achieved through participation at low individual
cost.
We shall provide a unifying framework based on interaction models that are mobile in the sense that they may be transferred to other components, this being a mechanism for Web service composition and for coalition formation. A key contribution of OpenKnowledge is to demonstrate that by shifting the emphasis to interaction (the details of which may be hidden from users) we can obtain knowledge sharing sufficient quality for sustainable communities of practise without the barrier of complex meta-data provision prior to community formation. We ground our research in two testbed arenas: bioinformatics and emergency response.
