KDI-98
Concept Switching in Knowledge Networks for Community Medicine.

The Net of the 21st Century will radically transform the interaction with knowledge. Traditionally, online information has been dominated by data centers with large collections indexed by trained professionals. The rise of the Web and the information infrastructure of distributed personal computing have rapidly developed the technologies of collections for independent communities. In the future, online information will be dominated by small collections maintained and indexed by the community members themselves.

The information infrastructure must similarly be radically different to support indexing of community collections and searching across such small collections. The base infrastructure will be knowledge networks rather than transmission networks. Users will consider themselves to be navigating in the Interspace, across logical spaces of semantic indexes, rather than in the Internet, across physical networks of computer servers.

Future knowledge networks will rely on scalable semantics, on indexing the small collections so that they can effectively searched within the Net of a billion repositories. The most important feature of the infrastructure is thus providing functionality of correlating across the indexed collections. Just as the transmission networks of the Internet are connected via switching machines that switch packets, the knowledge networks of the Interspace will be connected via switching machines that switch concepts.

The current proposal concerns research to develop scalable technology for correlating semantic indexes across information sources. Scalable implies that the correlating works automatically, on collections across different subject domains, on collections at different levels of abstraction. The correlation across sources will form the fundamental technology for the switching machines of the Interspace. Concept switching across knowledge networks is the fundamental operation in navigating the billion repositories of the Interspace.

Community medicine is an area of great interest to the general public, since health issues affect every person. Healthcare sources are perhaps the most used and the most valuable information currently on the Net. But the information networks are providing ordinary people with information that they cannot understand properly, such as journal articles from MEDLINE saying their conditions are serious in some cases. Knowledge networks are needed instead to provide the information in the terminology and the context understandable by the users.

For example, patients could investigate their conditions further by concept switching from home diagnosis brochures up into nursing treatment manuals. Or they could understand a professional diagnosis better by concept switching from nursing diagnosis manuals down into home treatment brochures.

The proposed research will first develop fundamental new technologies for concept switching using techniques from a variety of scientific disciplines. These technologies will then be used to semantically index collections at different levels of sophistication in community medicine. Next, through collaborations with local health services in the university and in the community, the switching technologies will be experimentally tested for searching effectiveness in realistic situations, with real sources and real users.

Finally, these evaluations will enable development of effective generic technology for concept switching in knowledge networks for the general public. Such semantic interoperability is a general and fundamental technology for knowledge networks, which will enable members of one community to effectively search repositories of other communities.