John Welton, MSN, RN:
>1. Who will pay for the project and maintain it?
Everybody interested. At the moment this seems to include almost everybody
who has some money to spend (and who doesn't): government, firms,
individuals, societies...
>2. Where will it reside: one site, multiple sites?
Apparently, you are not well acquainted with the World-Wide Web. As the
name already says it, it will be distributed world-wide over an unlimited
number of sites.
>3. Will the project encompass all sites and all knowledge or will there be
>separate projects such as a health care node?
I am not sure what you mean by "the project": the WWWeb and by implication
the super-brain will encompass all sites that are willing to connect, which
means all those that don't want to hide from the public. All knowledge that
somebody cares to put on the Web will be available, which means that
normally at least all knowledge that is studied in academic institutions
will be there. As discussed in the latest Scientific American, it seems
highly likely that *all* academic publications (journals, books, ...) etc.
will migrate to the Web in the short term due to burgeoning publication
costs for low distribution specialist publications. Separate projects can
be and will be developed within that larger framework, but it would be
stupid to cut all connections with other domains (unless, again, they have
some private information they want to hide).
>4. Who will maintain the individual knowledge bases?
Whoever is willing to do the job (e.g. I am maintaining the PCP Web), or is
appointed to do so by a higher institution (firm, library, university...).
As the Web becomes more intelligent (i.e. turns into the super-brain) it
will do more and more of the maintenance on its own.
> How will you address
>questions of reliability and validity?
That is a more tricky question. In first instance, I would rely on natural
selection: invalid or unreliable knowledge would lose respectability and
thus lose connections to other parts of the Web (I would not like to link
my knowledge base to another one of which I know it contains lots of
errors). I also would like to remark that except for critical cases (war,
life-saving surgery, a planetary mission) absolute reliability is much less
important that one tends to think: my brain contains lots of imprecise,
ambiguous and outright false ideas and assumptions, but that does not stop
me from living a relatively adequate life. The main principle is that the
system should be able to learn from its mistakes, and to correct errors.
>5. Can the project be embedded into local databases. For example, I have a
>health care database that collects data on patients in acute care settings.
>Can I use the brain to access knowledge on certain aspects of patient care,
>symptoms, current research on a particular disease, treatment, etc.? Can I
>integrate the interface into the database so that it seems transparent to
>the end user?
This seems like a technical issue which can be solved in principle (though
there may be a lot of effort and expenses involved)
>6. Will the brain be able to adapt to future transport modes? Will it be
>compatible with existing software or will it act as a stand alone portal?
I am not sure what you mean by "transport mode". The compatibily issue is
rather well-tackled by the present WWW: it runs on almost all computer
systems in use, and allows the exchange of data between totally different
operating systems. The details of integrating any specific software will
have to be tackled on the spot, but pose no fundamental problems.
>7. Are there security and privacy issues? For example, should all the
>knowledge embedded in the web be available to all users? What about
>copyright and other intellectual property rights issues - how will these be
>handled? Virus and hacker protection?
Yes, these are some really difficult questions. A priori there is no
obligation to include knowledge on the Web, and there is no obligation to
make everything available to everybody. It is possible to have subwebs wich
are only reachable by some people. For copyright issues, there is the very
nice (though technically rather sophisticated) solution proposed in Ted
Nelson's Xanadu project: each time a document on the Web is used by
anybody, a small amount of money is automatically transferred from the
user's account to the author's account. With the present state of
technology the first experimental implementations of such a system are
already appearing.
At present, WWW seems rather insensitive towards viruses, but you can never
give guarantees in that domain. A big effort is being put in all kinds of
security systems (e.g. Kerberos) with different, very strict methods of
coding data and identifying users, thus keeping a check on hackers. But
that is not something I am personally very interested in.
>Overall I find the proposal fascinating and provocative. I can see quite a
>number of applications in my field (medical/nursing informatics) but the
>scope of the project may be too ambitious. You might consider taking a
>small and well defined domain and implement it at a few sites.
That is exactly what we are doing with the Principia Cybernetica Web. We
hope that some of the ideas we are testing in our local system (e.g. the
adaptive hypertext) may find their way into the WWWeb as a whole. (which is
the way all other innovations have been spread over the Internet).
_______________________________________________________________________
Dr. Francis Heylighen Systems Researcher
PO, Free University of Brussels, Pleinlaan 2, B -1050 Brussels, Belgium
Phone: +32-2-629 25 25; Fax: +32-2-629 24 89 (**new numbers!)
Email:fheyligh@vnet3.vub.ac.be; URL: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html