Facts, Opinions and Bias in Time

Full title: LivingKnowledge – Facts, Opinions and Bias in Time
Acronym: LivingKnowledge
Type of funding scheme: Large-Scale Integrating Project (IP)
Seventh Framework Programme, ICT Call 3 – FET proactive 6: ICT Forever Yours
Grant agreement n. 231126
Name of the coordinating person: Fausto Giunchiglia

Starting from 01/02/2009, 36 months

List of Participants

1. University of Trento, UniTN IT (Coordinator)
2. Fundació Barcelona Media Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Yahoo! Research Barcelona), BM ES
3. SORA Institute for Social Research and Analysis Ogris & Hofinger GmbH, SORA AT
4. Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni, CNIT IT
5. Stichting European Archive, EA NL
6. Università degli Studi di Pavia, UniPV IT
7. University of Southampton, SOTON ECS UK
8. Documentation Research and Training Center, Indian Statistical Institute, ISI IN
9. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover (L3S Research Center), LUH DE
10. Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V., MPII DE

Abstract

Knowledge and its articulations are strongly influenced by diversity in, e.g., cultural backgrounds, schools of thought, geographical contexts. Judgements, assessments and opinions, which play a crucial role in many areas of democratic societies, including politics and economics, reflect this diversity in perspective and goals. For the information on the Web (including, e.g., news and blogs) diversity - implied by the ever increasing multitude of information providers - is the reason for diverging viewpoints and conflicts. Time and evolution add a further dimension making diversity an intrinsic and unavoidable property of knowledge.
The vision inspiring LivingKnowledge is to consider diversity an asset and to make it traceable, understandable and exploitable, with the goal to improve navigation and search in very large multimodal datasets (e.g., the Web itself). LivingKnowledge will study the effect of diversity and time on opinions and bias, a topic with high potential for social and economic exploitation. We envisage a future where search and navigation tools (e.g., search engines) will automatically classify and organize opinions and bias (about, e.g., global warming or the Olympic games in China) and, therefore, will produce more insightful, better organized, easier-to-understand output.
LivingKnowledge employs interdisciplinary competences from, e.g., philosophy of science, cognitive science, library science and semiotics. The proposed solution is based on the foundational notions of context and its ability to localize meaning, and the notion of facet, as from library science, and its ability to organize knowledge as a set of interoperable components (i.e., facets). The project will construct a very large testbed, integrating many years of Web history and value-added knowledge, state-of-the-art search technology and the results of the project. The testbed will be made available for experimentation, dissemination, and exploitation.

Keywords: Diversity, bias, time and evolution, opinions, context, facets, pattern recognition, knowledge management, search.

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Our publications on the project

• Marco Porta, (2012). Towards Automatic Analysis of Climate Change Websites: A contribution to the Living Knowledge Project, Web genres and web tools, Mariavita Cambria, Cristina Arizzi, Francesca Coccetta eds., Ibis, Como, p. 497-505, ISBN: 978-88-7164-404-2.
• Alessandro Gaggia, (2012). The McaWeb Tools: A contribution to the Living Knowledge Project, Web genres and web tools, Mariavita Cambria, Cristina Arizzi, Francesca Coccetta eds., Ibis, Como, p. 475-495, ISBN: 978-88-7164-404-2.