Group items tagged

Sensing importance across a sea of dynamic systems with constantly changing data requires the accumulation and persistence of context. (I am using the term persistence here to mean storing/saving what one has observed and learned - in a database for example.)

Later in GLUT, Wright touches on how the card catalog of libraries became separated from the main library content, the actual books. Libraries became so big and accumulated so many volumes that it was no longer feasible to store the metadata for each volume with the volume. So that information was collected and stored elsewhere. This is important because the computational world we all inhabit has similarly been shaped by resource constraints. In our case the original constraints are long gone, but we continue to live in their shadow.

As computers and computer networks become more sophisticated, a huge amount of information, such as that found in Web documents, has been accumulated and circulated. Such information gives people a framework for organizing their daily lives. A well-functioning society needs technology that can be used to manage this wealth of information and, in particular, investigate its credibility. This technology would be able to handle a wide range of tasks: extracting credible information related to a given topic, organizing this information, detecting its provenance, clarifying background, facts, and various related opinions and the distribution of them, and so on. Especially, as the Web is becoming a major source of information nowadays, it is necessary to provide efficient and reliable methods for evaluation of Web content's trustworthiness. The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussion on issues related to information credibility criteria and the process of its evaluation.

As cultures and languages vanish, along with them go vast and ancient storehouses of accumulated knowledge. And as species disappear, along with them go not just valuable genetic resources, but critical links in complex ecological webs.

A system and method for organizing knowledge in such a way that humans can find knowledge, learn from it, and add to it as needed is disclosed. The exemplary system has four components: a knowledge base, a learning model and an associated tutor, a set of user tools, and a backend system. The invention also preferably comprises a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow these components to work together, so that other people can create their own versions of each of the components. In the knowledge web a community of people with knowledge to share put knowledge in the database using the user tools. The knowledge may be in the form of documents or other media, or it may be a descriptor of a book or other physical source. Each piece of knowledge is associated with various types of meta-knowledge about what the knowledge is for, what form it is in, and so on. The information in the knowledge base can be created specifically for the knowledge base, but it can also consist of information converted from other sources, such as scientific documents, books, journals, Web pages, film, video, audio files, and course notes. The initial content of the knowledge web comprises existing curriculum materials, books and journals, and those explanatory pages that are already on the World Wide Web. These existing materials already contain most of the information, examples, problems, illustrations, even lesson plans, that the knowledge web needs. The knowledge base thus represents the core content (online documents or references to online or offline documents); the meta-knowledge that was created at the time of entry; and a number of user annotations and document metadata that accumulate over time about the usefulness of the knowledge, additional user opinions, certifications of its veracity and usefulness, commentary, and connections between various units of knowledge.