Knowledge Representation And Orgnization For Personal Ontology

Tech ID: 20918 / UC Case 2008-712-0

Brief Description

UC Irvine researchers have developed Savant, a powerful, graphically-oriented search and traversal method that enables the user to “put together the right information at the right time” at speeds that eclipse previous. The next generation Web 3.0 will accommodate ontology-based architectures and provide key-words and relationships for many common concepts. Savant will be Web 3.0 compatible, and will help drive its development.

Full Description

It has been said, “We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely. " The technology in this UC Case, which we call Savant, is software that greatly facilitates the process of synthesis of information, in the sense of the previous quote.

Savant is ontology driven. An ontology is a representation of knowledge. It is made up of key-words that refer to real-world objects, e.g., automobile, driver, planet, etc., and relationships between the key-words, e.g., “an automobile is driven by a driver”. The relationship “an automobile is driven by a driver” becomes a fact, or an element of knowledge, in the ontology. At any point in the ontology synthesis process, Savant provides powerful, graphically-oriented search and traversal methods that enable the user to “put together the right information at the right time” in speeds that eclipse previous methods - stacks of paper print-outs and/or web browser book-marks and tags. Standards are currently being put in-place for a next generation Web, Web 3.0, that accommodates ontology-based architectures and provides key-words and relationships for many common concepts. Savant will be Web 3.0 compatible, and will help drive Web 3.0 development.

Savant focuses on the development of personal ontologies. As the user surfs the web and encounters new information, Savant will provide proprietary Information Acquisition Technology that enables the capture of key-words and statements that contain them. Savant’s Behind-the-Scenes Ontology creation tools will convert key-words into ontology entities, sometimes referred to as Concepts, and statements into Relationships. Importantly, the location where an ontology entity is found is also captured, so the user can always answer the question, “Where did I read that?”. Savant’s web-based software technology will allow any user conducting research on the internet to easily and efficiently organize and manage the relevant information. For example, if the user is conducting research on a particular topic visiting multiple Web-Pages with bits of relevant information, he can easily highlight, drag, and drop the keywords or statements into his personal ontology and the system will simply record the Web address (URL), and when the user returns to those Web-Pages at a later time, the system will highlight to indicate the previously selected text. If the user is reading a PDF file of a technical paper and selects various keywords and statements to insert into his ontology, the full reference, including the paper’s title, authors, etc., will be recorded. This permits automatic bibliography generation. Users can easily share their ontologies or parts of it with colleagues for collaboration purposes or simply to share knowledge. Furthermore, Savant will provide its user the option to take the Concepts and Relationships formed in the personal ontologies and run more intelligent search queries throughout the internet, including journal databases, news sources, and other Web-Pages. This will allow anyone conducting research to always have the most up-to-date and relevant information made available once they log-in to Savant. The more Concepts and Relationships a user forms, the more intelligent and relevant search queries Savant will make.

In addition to developing one’s own ontology (Concepts and Relationships), Savant will support the incorporation of others. These external ontologies may come from standards, industry models, and other individuals, all of which are being worked on now. This is possible since Savant will be built according to the Web 3.0 Application Architecture using Web 3.0 tools. Savant will actually be a series of Applications (App’s, as in Apple’s phrase, There’s an App for ThatTM), all of which will be based on the same Web-Based Architecture. Three Applications are in the planning stages, one that will be for “News Junkies”, which will focus on the major sources of news on the Web, one that is a General-Purpose Knowledge-Acquisition and Management , and one for Biological/Pharmaceutical Researchers. The reason for this choice of initial Applications is to ensure the Savant architecture is sufficiently general to handle nearly any topic domain, while focusing on domains that have great need and whose Applications can be delivered fairly rapidly. Furthermore, ontology-based products are already common-place in Biological/Pharmaceutical applications, and with Savant’s much more powerful Web 3.0 architecture, Savant should handily beat the existing Web 2.0 competition. Lastly, the Savant architecture is planned to be modularized so that its users can have the appropriate user-experience, whether their access is via anything from smart-phone to a desktop browser.

Suggested uses

Search, organization and information management

Advantages

Faster, simpler all-in-one approach to data and information management

Contact

Learn About UC TechAlerts - Save Searches and receive new technology matches

Other Information

Categorized As


5270 California Avenue / Irvine,CA
92697-7700 / Tel: 949.824.2683
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Twitter
  • Twitter
  • Twitter