Knowledge living on the web (KLW)

Abstract

The amount of information currently available on the Internet is absolutely huge. The absence of semantic organization in the web resources hinders the access and use of the information stored and in particular the access to the computational systems in an autonomous manner. Ontologies make use of formal structures mainly based in logics to define and allow reuse of the knowledge stored on the Internet. This article presents a different line of work which does not provide an alternative to already existing ontologies but is intended to complement one another by coexisting on the Internet. The foundations of our proposal lie in the idea that the nature of knowledge, which is evolutionary, emergent, self-generative, is closer to the characteristics associated to life rather than to those pertaining to logics or mathematics. We attempt to use the Internet to generate a virtual world where knowledge can grow and evolve according to artificial life rules utilizing users as replicators, as well as the use they make of such knowledge on the Internet. We have developed a representation scheme called KDL (Knowledge Description Language), a DKS server application (Domain Knowledge Server) and a KEE user interface (Knowledge Explorer and Editor) which allow Internet users register, search, use and refer the knowledge housed on the KLW Web. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.