SSP Project Summary:
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The Knowledge Tree

Student

Alexander Presber, Max Born Institute Berlin

Supervisor

Mario Antonioletti, EPCC

Users are often seen to attempt to reinvent the wheel, asking the same questions or coming up with novel and interesting ways of tackling a problem or using a utility. This is not solely restricted to external users, with the flow of new EPCC staff requiring training and similar advice. It would be interesting to provide a web-based database to be able to record, extend and encapsulate these ideas. More importantly a way would have to be thought up to make this information easily accessible via the web.

The aim of this SSP project is for the student to develop these ideas and come up with a set of CGI scripts that may instantiate some of these concepts. I would like to explore ways to input information through a web-based interface and then more importantly be able to make this information available in an easily accessible fashion, such as hyperbolic trees [1] if possible, with which users could then easily interact. It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel - existing technologies like groupware or web conferencing software [2] could be explored to see if any of this software could be used for this purpose.

To start off with we will start with a simple guest book or hypernews-like [3] way of placing information into the database. This would then have to be processed in a way that makes information retrieval straight-forward - possibly XML may offer ways of doing this. Another interesting script to develop and try out would allow annotations to be made so that links could be created to other parts of the database by users wishing to add information or make annotations. The set of CGI scripts should be general enough to be able to be used for other purposes, e.g. the long-awaited EPCC library book recording system.

  1. New Scientist, 23 January 1999 p.34.
  2. http://thinkofit.com/webconf.
  3. http://www.hypernews.org/HyperNews/get/hypernews.html.
The final report for this project is available here.
Webpage maintained by mario@epcc.ed.ac.uk