Expected Outcome

Posted February 14, 2010

As a FET project, the main focus of LivingKnowledge is on demanding and high risk research as required to establish and move forward the emerging and increasingly important area of diversity-, bias- and evolution-aware retrieval of information. The main expected outcomes of the LivingKnowledge project are radically new insights for dealing with diversity, bias and evolution in information access and search, with innovative methods and algorithms for exploiting available diversity on the Web in all main dimensions. We expect to considerably advance the state of the art in areas related to dealing with bias and evolution in textual as well as multimedia content, including and extending current information extraction and search technology. We foresee the establishment of diversity, bias- and evolution-aware retrieval of information and handling of knowledge as a valuable research topic of its own, bringing together experts from different disciplines in computer science and beyond.

We also believe that we will be able to show the real potential of the project results through two ambitious and complementary case studies provided in our LivingKnowledge testbed, which will itself be a major, not easily replicable, outcome of the project. The testbed, which will be based on Web archive collections as well as appropriate crawls by Yahoo!, will provide us with valuable requirements to guide our research on diversity-enabled retrieval and interpretation of information and will enable us to thoroughly test and evaluate all methods and algorithms developed in our project. The testbed will also enable and support research by interested researchers outside the consortium on all issues of knowledge diversity, evolution and retrieval, and foster such research collaborations by enabling joint use of the LivingKnowledge collections and algorithms, as well as their extension by this community. The testbed will therefore, together with all other research results and algorithms developed in the project, constitute a very valuable outcome of the LivingKnowledge project.

Furthermore, two exemplary applications implementing two ambitious and complementary case studies will be built on top of the LivingKnowledge testbed for illustrating the benefits and potentials of applying the LivingKnowledge approach. The applications will also provide us with valuable requirements to guide our research on diversity-enabled retrieval and interpretation of information and will enable us to test the developed approach in concrete application settings. In more detail, our “Media Content Analyser”, based on information available already on the Web, will address questions about the public image of a company, possibly changing over time, or the effectiveness of a PR campaign as reflected through user generated content in blogs and other public forums.

Our “Future Predictor” will combine and test all methods necessary to answer factual queries regarding future events and statements. Based on the European Archive, and coupled with Yahoo! News, it will constantly update the statements and predictions about the future, and make them available for searching and mining the future as part of the yahoo.com web portal. This will make the project outcomes available to millions of users all around the world, thus providing the project with a significant impact.

The testbed and the two pilot applications will be the basis for future exploitation of both the testbed and the technology developed in the project.