Monday, July 16, 2007

What is a Wisdi (cont)?

Thanks to the success of Wikipedia few people are unfamiliar with a Wiki. Ward Cunningham, inventor of the Wiki, described it as the "simplest online database that can possibly work". A Wiki helps people share knowledge in a collaborative fashion. Some key ideas of a wiki are:

  • Anyone can contribute.
  • The system is self correcting.
  • Wiki content is meant for human consumption.

Based on the success of the Wiki I intend to launch the first Wisdi. A Wisdi is a mashup of the concept of a Wiki and the concept of a knowledge base (Wiki + Wisdom = Wisdi). It is an online database of knowledge in a form suitable for computer consumption. It is intended as a foundation for research and development of intelligent software (AI). Like a wiki, it will grow organically by the contribution of many individuals.

I am in the early stages of design of the first Wisdi but there a few concrete things I can say at this moment.

  • It will be a web service.
  • It will provide an simple interface for human browsing and editing of knowledge.
  • It will be different from Cyc.
  • Internally, it will be based on my Semantic Vector Space Model but systems need not buy into that model to use the Wisdi.

More details of the project will be posted here in the future and eventually on www.wisdi.net.

2 comments:

Ward Cunningham said...

I'm interested. I've read your mind map and agree that there is a lot of technology there that could complement wiki.

I've experimented with a wiki where dozens to hundreds of nodes can usefully be displayed together based on a weak hierarchical structure.

Sal Mangano said...

I like the idea of weak (or as I like to think of them, emergent) hierarchical structure. Hope we can correspond some more off-blog.