Towards a collaboratively-built knowledge base of & for scalable knowledge sharing and retrieval
Abstract
This document first introduces reasons why a "collaboratively-built&evaluated global well-organized secure
Semantic Web" is needed to support scalable information retrieval, sharing and management processes (within an intranet
or on the Web) that are both precision-oriented and completeness-oriented. With respect to that goal, current approaches for
the Semantic Web and, more generally, the sharing and retrieval of knowledge – information organized in a (semi-)formal
way – are insufficient. Indeed, these approaches exploit but do not try to minimize the creation of documents or knowledge
bases (KBs) that are mostly informal or independently created and hence with few formal semantic relations between their
content. In other words, they do not minimize implicit redundancies/contradictions nor support the incremental refinement,
organization and evaluation of knowledge by intranet/Web users.
The main parts of this document propose various elements of solutions (that complement those of current approaches and
that are partly or fully implemented by the "personal"/"shared" knowledge servers WebKB-1 and WebKB-2, both usable at
www.webkb.org):
· a web-accessible/updatable multi-source large ontology/KB that is a loss-less integration and extension of various
current top-level ontologies and which includes a transformation of WordNet into an actual lexical ontology of
English with intuitive identifiers for the concepts;
· a top-level/core for an ontology of knowledge management/sharing (approaches, tasks, techniques, criteria for
comparing tools, languages, ...) which includes a categorization of the techniques that are proposed in this document:
· a cross-referencing and regular mirroring based approach between the KBs of partially
competing/complementary knowledge servers so that it does not matter which KBs are queried or updated by
people (this permits to combine the advantages of distributed and centralized knowledge sharing approaches);
· a framework for a precision-oriented collaborative evaluation of the usefulness (truthfulness, originality, ...) of
each piece of information and information provider;
· KB editing protocols that keep it free of automatically/manually detected inconsistencies – and lead people to
relate their knowledge/assertions/beliefs – while not forcing these people to discuss or agree on terminology and
beliefs nor requiring any selection committee;
· lexical/structural/semantic normalization rules for knowledge representation or organization;
· various knowledge entering/search/comparison operators and KB-generated forms that extend or complement
classic operators and static forms;
· three complementary knowledge representation notations that are more expressive, intuitive and/or concise than
current common notations and whose parser(s) could be adapted to parse most current knowledge representation
languages (KRLs) and allow user-specified derivations of them (to that end, an ontology of KRL structures and
presentations is proposed); a fourth language is also proposed by WebKB-1 and WebKB-2 for permitting the mixing
of these notations and the combination of their knowledge assertion/search/comparison commands.
Origin | Files produced by the author(s) |
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