Bridging the gap between knowledge consumers and producers

Innes A. Ferguson, Ph.D.
Active On-line Systems Ltd.
13 Grange Park, Flat 4
London W5 3PL, UK

Whether you access the Internet for business or pleasure, finding the 
right information, in a reasonable amount of time, is becoming more and 
more challenging. While the volume of useful information on the Web is 
increasing daily, so too is the amount of misinformation and noise. In 
fact, it's getting to the point where having too much information is 
almost as bad as not having enough. 

What we need is some way of identifying what is relevant about the 
information being sought and the purpose for which the information is 
being sought. Put another way, what we need is an intelligent way of 
evaluating the content of sources in order to be able to relate it to 
the context of users' interests over these sources. 

Knowledge is what gives information context and meaning. Increasingly, 
for most organizations, knowledge has become their single most valuable 
asset. Companies can benefit from an increased understanding of such 
assets; doing so will enable them to improve the quality of their 
decision-making processes and sharpen their competitive edge.

At Active On-line Systems we are interested in helping interested 
parties to discover, capture, understand, share, communicate, organize, 
transform, re-use or otherwise utilize the intellectual capital within 
their organizations or given contexts of use. As such, we have been 
researching and developing a number of techniques and solutions for 
information and knowledge management, including agents for information 
brokering, personalized information retrieval and filtering, context 
modelling, adaptive user interest profiling, data mining, knowledge 
representation, decision support, and collaborative filtering, 

Given the explosive growth of both content and usage on the Internet, 
key design concerns in creating our solutions include scalability and 
flexibility. When considering possible design strategies for these 
solutions a metaphor we have found useful is that of economic markets. 
Why? Because markets are naturally decentralized and are capable, in the 
long term, of efficiently managing scarce resources and the changing 
supply and demand for these scare resources. Above all, they are capable 
of self-optimization and evolution.

>From our point of view, AgentLink's I2A SIG presents a unique 
opportunity to explore and share ideas for understanding the role of and 
applying intelligent agents to information and knowledge management. 
Active On-line Systems is thus keen to work with any parties interested 
in the research and development of intelligent agents for information 
and knowledge management. Specific interests from such parties in 
information retrieval and agent-based computational market-based systems 
would be a plus.