bruce@SRI-TSC.ARPA (Bruce McHenry) (02/21/86)
From: Bruce McHenry <bruce@sri-tsc.ARPA>
[Forwarded from the AI-Ed distribution by Laws@SRI-AI.]
A New R&D Program: The Community Authoring Project (CAP)
The goal of the CAP is to provide a system which a large number
of people can use to create and store a complex body of knowledge.
Such a body, because it is authored and edited by many people, will
address a wide variety of individual perspectives. Individuals will be
guided through this body with the help of user agents. The user agents
will correspond with "idea" agents which monitor the formation of
communities. While this approach applies to information and management
systems in general, the CAP aims to develop prototypes which can be
used in leading universities over the next few years. Such
universities will posess advanced workstations upon which CAP software
may run. The resulting community information system should provide
immediate benefits to teachers and students who may use it to create,
either alone or in conference, multimedia (visual & aural) "sections".
Sections may be embedded in eachother and interactively created,
explored and manipulated. CAP technology will enable communities to
create broadbased bodies of knowledge in ways such that the
individual's "question in mind" can be readily addressed. The testbed
sites will also provide attractive cultures for research into AI (i.e.
knowledge based, natural language and self-organizing) systems. However,
the CAP's design philosophy is based on a pragmatic view of common
human methods for locating and disseminating information. Its basis in
community participation provides a radical departure from current
methods of authoring interactive materials and it is expected that the
CAP will dramatically influence the development of interactive media
such as digital compact discs.
Bruce McHenryGarvey@SRI-AI.ARPA (Tom Garvey) (02/28/86)
From: Tom Garvey <Garvey@SRI-AI.ARPA> While I would certainly not want to be viewed as a stifler of creative urges, sometimes it seems that a little common-sense, reality, engineering knowledge, ..., injected into our blue-skying would go a long way toward setting feasible goals. What makes CAP (to which any yahoo could presumably add his personal view of the world) anything more than, say, a multimedia extension of this BBOARD? Cheers, Tom -------