The internet knowledge manager, dynamic digital libraries, and agents you can understand

Abstract

People represent knowledge as symbols, words, concepts, pictures, and so on. A change in the way human knowledge is represented in software can trigger a major change in business practices. For example, the invention of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) has triggered the development of the Web, and of successful Web-based businesses. Knowledge Management is currently viewed as important to the success of large enterprises and of linked economies. A Digital Library for business, in which authors have rights and royalties, can be viewed as a means of doing Knowledge Management in a linked economy. Authors are persuaded, partly by royalties, to share their knowledge and make it explicit as text, audio, and video "documents". Software is used to: find, mix and match, and deliver parts of the documents; to ensure that rights are respected; and to calculate royalties. The Internet Knowledge Manager is an environment that provides an understandable way of representing knowledge as readable agents that can also be run as software. It uses some new technology to add a new way of using the World Wide Web. With the IKM, you can use a standard Web browser to write and run your own agents, and you can do this in English, without programming. Since agents are written in English, they can be placed in a Digital Library, and selectively retrieved using ordinary text search techniques. Thus, the IKM adds a new way in which human knowledge can be represented in software, and it could trigger new ways of doing business on the Web. I show a simple example of writing and running an IKM agent for transfer pricing, and I describe how the new technology works.