PCP Research on Intelligent
WebsDifferent participants in the Principia Cybernetica
Project are researching algorithms to inject more intelligence
into the web, and into distributed knowledge systems in general. The
main idea is that the different documents available on the web can
be seen as nodes in a network, connected by a number of links, along
which variable numbers of users travel in search for information.
The resulting directed graph can be enhanced with weights (that,
e.g., measure the frequency of usage) and semantic link types, and
reorganized in order to provide better access to the knowledge that
it contains. This makes it possible to "mine" the implicit knowledge
distributed over millions of documents, the connections between
them, and the way they are used.
This knowledge can be used to improve the quality of the results
that users get in return for their queries, point them towards
relevant documents, reorganize the web to make it more efficient,
and even discover wholly new concepts and relationships. Thus, the
collective intelligence of the millions of users and authors of web
information may be leveraged, turning the web from a mere repository
of information into an adaptive, self-organizing knowledge system
that actively "thinks" in interaction with its users.
Such an intelligent web can be seen as a first step towards the
"global brain",
which according to our philosophy is the likely next stage in
evolution. More generally, this research is inspired by the
theoretical concepts and principles from cybernetics, systems,
complexity, cognition, evolution and self-organization that underly
the whole of the Principia Cybernetica
philosophy. As such, it allows us to to formalize and
operationalize some parts of the theory, and to test it by
experiments and practical applications.
Research centersThis research is carried out mostly
at the Center "Leo Apostel"
at the Free
University of Brussels (VUB), by Francis Heylighen, Johan Bollen
and Alex Riegler, and at Distributed Knowledge Systems Team, by Cliff
Joslyn, Luis Rocha and Johan Bollen, at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The two
groups collaborate closely, and keep contact with a number of
related groups and centers, such as the Global Brain
Group, the Symbiotic
Intelligence Project, and Cognitive
Technologies, inc. It is possible to join one of these groups as
a researcher at the
PhD or PostDoc level.
Different approachesVarious algorithms and
techniques are being explored within the general paradigm of a
distributed, self-organizing knowledge network. One basic paradigm,
first developed by the Brussels group, is the one of the learning web,
which sees links beween web pages as analogous to synapses in the
brain, which adapt their connection strength to the frequency of
their usage (the Hebb rule for neural networks). Another application
is Luis Rocha's Talkmine system inspired by methods from fuzzy set
theory, Pask's conversation theory and collaborative filtering. The
two approaches are presently being integrated in the project on Active
Recommendation Systems for the Library Without Walls. A final
approach developed by the Brussels group is the structuring of
networks of concepts by "bootstrapping" the distinctions between
concepts. This makes it possible to merge, differentiate or cluster
different nodes in a network.
In addition to these systems developed by us, we are exploring
other methods to turn the web into an associative network
(basically, a weighted, directed graph). A number of methods use
existing links or connectivity
patterns to compute the importance or "authority" of a web page
for a given query. This makes it possible to cluster related pages
into "communities" that cover a given subject domain. It is also
possible to derive similarity weights between pages by using
co-citation of pages or co-occurrence of words. This analysis of web
connectivity patterns is complemented by a number of techniques used
in collaborative
filtering, which uses the similarity between users' preferences
to recommend particular pages to particular users.
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