Cooperatively updated knowledge bases as an optimal medium to learn, publish, evaluate and collaborate

Abstract

We argue that cooperatively updated formal or semi-formal knowledge bases (semantic networks) can and should be used as a shared medium for the tasks of researching, publishing, teaching, learning, evaluating and collaborating, and that students, teachers, researchers, decision makers, employees and other information providers or consumers, teams or individuals, could and should be performing very similar tasks and use very similar tools. This does not mean that traditional methods (e.g., face-to-face teaching and document publishing) should be replaced by knowledge-based methods but that they should be complemented by them whenever this is possible. To support our claims we have designed a knowledge-based server (WebKB-2) implementing the ideas that we propose and we have begun applying them to our own research domains and to several courses in our university. Although we have implemented this server as a Web server for practical reasons, the same techniques could be applied to a semantic grid, a learning grid or a peer-to-peer network.