Link of the Week - LarKC: The "Large Knowledge Collider" |
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The Large Knowledge Collider, or LarKC (pronounced 'lark'), is part of a €10 million project to promote "massive distributed incomplete reasoning." The goal is to go beyond the limited storage, querying and inference technology currently available, and enable semantic computing - in which data is given meaning (semantics) that enables computers to look up and "reason" in response to, say, user searches. Or, in an example from Wikipedia - at the moment, a person can create a web page that lists items for sale. The HTML of this person's catalog page can make simple, document-level assertions such as "this document's title is 'Widget Superstore,' " but there is no capability within the HTML itself to assert unambiguously that, for example, item number X586172 is an Acme Gizmo with a retail price of €199, or that it is a consumer product. There is no way to say "this is a catalog" or even to establish that "Acme Gizmo" is a kind of title or that "€199" is a price. But by using metatags, for example, or "information about information," you can add meanings to the page that enable it to be recognized by a search engine. Larkc researchers hope to similarly enrich the current, logic-based Semantic Web reasoning methods with methods drawn from information retrieval, machine learning, information theory, databases, and probabilistic reasoning. Such methods employ techniques based upon concepts such as reinforcement, habituation, relevance reasoning, and bounded rationality, to build a distributed reasoning platform and realize it on a high-performance computing cluster. Because it draws upon information from so many different fields, LarKC is indeed a "knowledge collider." -Dan Drollette, iSGTW |
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