Research

Shortipedia is an example of a provenance-aware social knowledge collection site. We are investigating novel techniques to support improved organization of content from volunteer contributors, provenance records that document the sources of each piece of structured content, and proactively guide contributors to areas where further knowledge is needed. Our aim is to enable millions of web users to structure, manage, and access knowledge in their social communities of interest by developing novel techniques that:

• Allow end users with no programming background to contribute structured knowledge, so that knowledge sharing can be easy, frequent, and fluid in a community of interest
• Allow the structure of the content to be defined by the contributors themselves, and allow it to emerge as part of the self-organization that arises from community content development rather than from pre-defined schemas or ontologies
• Accept diverging views and evidence, in order to support the acquisition of conflicting or contradictory facts that occur naturally when different results are obtained in practice
• Allow users to annotate the sources of any information, so users can make trust judgments on what views to adopt
• Automatically aggregate related information, in order to support reasonably interesting factual queries
• Self-analyze the contents and their usage, so they can guide contributors to focus on knowledge gaps that are of immediate interest to the community