Knowledge web - Patent # 7502770 - PatentGenius
Jack Park
A system and method for organizing knowledge in such a way that humans
can find knowledge, learn from it, and add to it as needed is
disclosed. The exemplary system has four components: a knowledge base,
a learning model and an associated tutor, a set of user tools, and a
backend system. The invention also preferably comprises a set of
application programming interfaces
(APIs) that allow these components to work together, so that other
people can create their own versions of each of the components. In the
knowledge web a community of people with knowledge to share put
knowledge in the database using the user tools. The knowledge may be
in the form of documents or other media, or it may be a descriptor of
a book or other physical source. Each piece of knowledge is associated
with various types of meta-knowledge about what the knowledge is for,
what form it is in, and so on. The information in the knowledge base
can be created specifically for the knowledge base, but it can also
consist of information converted from other sources, such as
scientific documents, books, journals, Web pages, film, video, audio
files, and course notes. The initial content of the knowledge web
comprises existing curriculum materials, books and journals, and those
explanatory pages that are already on the World Wide Web. These
existing materials already contain most of the information, examples,
problems, illustrations, even lesson plans, that the knowledge web
needs. The knowledge base thus represents the core content (online
documents or references to online or offline documents); the
meta-knowledge that was created at the time of entry; and a number of
user annotations and document metadata that accumulate over time about
the usefulness of the knowledge, additional user opinions,
certifications of its veracity and usefulness, commentary, and
connections between various units of knowledge.
Sasa Rudan
Google Wave is exciting! Looking forward for beta release to start playing with it, I have some ideas but related to poets :)
Саша Рудан
Jack Park
claims carefully (the uspto.gov site for the patent is [1]), some of
the claims start to feel very much like things already out in the
public domain, for which patent examiners cannot be expected to be
aware; I suspect that at least some of the claims could be challenged.
For instance, http://thebrain.com/ has long had a patent on visual
display of relations. Another French expert system company had, as
early as the mid 1980s, a patent on the representation of relational
data in computers. Then, there are topic maps which were an ISO
standard in 1999; this patent was filed in 2001 and does not appear to
reference topic maps, which, for all those claims, appear remarkably
similar. Novak trademarked concept maps many years before that, and we
must not forget Sowa's book on conceptual graphs in the same time
frame.
Still, all the claims must be examined carefully; some of them may,
indeed, be contributions.
Perhaps the most appropriate next step is to contact Danny Hillis and
sort this all out.
I agree with the sentiments about Google Wave. At the moment, unless
they stumble badly (not very likely), Wave appears to be a game
changer in the same sense that the wiki was when it first appeared.
Jack
[1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=7502770&OS=7502770&RS=7502770
2009/6/8 Sasa Rudan <mpr...@gmail.com>: