Theoretical Foundations for Enabling a Web of Knowledge

The current web is a web of linked pages. Frustrated users search for facts by guessing which keywords or keyword phrases might lead them to pages where they can find facts. Can we make it possible for users to search directly for facts embedded in web pages? Instead of a web of human-readable pages containing machine-inaccessible facts, can the web be a web of machine-accessible facts superimposed over a web of human-readable pages? Ultimately, can the web be a web of knowledge that can provide direct answers to factual questions and support these answers by referencing and highlighting relevant base facts embedded in source pages? Answers to these questions call for distilling knowledge from the web’s wealth of heterogeneous digital data into a web of knowledge. But how? Or, even more fundamentally, what, precisely, is this web of knowledge, and what is required to enable it? To answer these questions, we proffer a theoretical foundation for a web of knowledge: We formally define a computational view of knowledge in a way that enables practical construction and use of a web of knowledge.