Davv,Indore

Assignment on: -
Knowledge Networking

Submitted to:-
Submitted By:-
Shilpa parikh
Swati Vyas

MBA (EC)-4th

SEM, 2yrs
 Knowledge- based
Networking
Knowledge based networking rest on the
strong belief that communities have knowledge
and expertise which needs to be synergized
with the existing information, in the context of
decision-making and initiating judicious action.
Just as knowledge gap needs to be bridged
between developing and industrial countries,
so too there are gaps within the country.
Knowledge based bridges the gap between the
communities and between development
professionals and rural people through
initiating interaction and dialogue, new
alliances, inter-personal networks, and cross-
sectoral links between organizations so that
"useful knowledge" is shared and channeled to
develop "best management practices" and
provide practical decision support.
Knowledge based networking implies that
knowledge is acquired not just by creation but
also by transfer of knowledge existing
elsewhere. Knowledge Networking holds the
prospect of an accelerated introduction of
state-of-art technologies superseding the step-
by-step process of transferring know-how and
technologies among users and possessor of
information. With the plummeting costs, the
transfer of knowledge is becoming cheaper
than ever. Networking for knowledge -sharing
caters to the global thirst for information,
builds up awareness among the change agents
or those who can exert external pressure, and
encourages informed and active participation
of communities and individuals. Further it
creates a mechanism which enables
articulation and sharing of local knowledge
with potential for further enrichment of this
information as it passes through the network
users. Benefits include more efficient and
targeted development intervention, less
duplication of activities, low communication
costs and global access to information and
human resources.

Knowledge Networking
(Abstract)
The Knowledge Networking (KN) initiative
focuses on the integration of knowledge from
different sources and domains across space
and time. Modern computing and
communications systems provide the
infrastructure to send bits anywhere, anytime
in mass quantities-radical connectivity. But
connectivity alone cannot assure (1) useful
communication across disciplines, languages,
cultures; (2) appropriate processing and
integration of knowledge from different
sources, domains, and non-text media; (3)
efficacious activity and arrangements for
teams, organizations, classrooms, or
communities, working together over distance
and time; or (4) deepening understanding of
the ethical, legal, and social implications of
new developments in connectivity. In short, we
have connectivity, but not interactivity and
integration. KN research aims to move beyond
connectivity to achieve new levels of
interactivity, increasing the semantic
bandwidth, knowledge bandwidth, activity
bandwidth, and cultural bandwidth among
people, organizations, and communities.
 Knowledge
Networking

To "know" about something is a much stronger

claim than to learn about it or to gather
information on it. "Knowledge" implies
consensual verification, as well as the ability to
predict and shape outcomes. Advances in
computing and communications now hold the
promise of fundamentally accelerating the
creation and distribution of information.
However, the construction of knowledge
requires more than collecting and transmitting
large amounts of data. Building knowledge
requires the scientific community coming to
grips with new forms of gathering data, new
tools to manipulate and store information new
ways of transforming that information, and new
ways of working together over distance and
time. The challenge for NSF is to facilitate the
evolution from today's emphasis on
information and distributed data to emerging
systems for knowledge and distributed
intelligence. The payoff for the scientific
community is that interdisciplinary
communities that can be joined in sharing
data, accumulating information and building
knowledge together will treat complex
problems, traditionally addressed within
disciplinary boundaries. This shift from simple
information access to knowledge networking
holds great promise for to transforming society
and science.
NSF represents large science, engineering, and
education communities that understand and
can contribute to building these knowledge
networks. Technological advances, spurred by
the NSF, now enable scientific practitioners,
who may be widely dispersed, to become a
science network, sharing and integrating data,
analyzing information and synthesizing
knowledge. NSF wants to expand and scale up
these activities in the sciences and
engineering, enabling society to apply similar
strategies throughout its information
infrastructures.
The NSF Knowledge Networking initiative
creates a program of closely interconnected
activities to facilitate advances enabled by
simultaneous revolutions in technology,
content, and epistemology. The intellectual
insights and the new process of science
enabled by knowledge networking are central
to NSF's mission.
 Challen
ges
One challenge is to support activities that will
create new ways of collecting, transforming,
representing, sharing, and using information.
The support must be applied effectively across
a wide range of activities to enable the solution
of the Knowledge Networking challenge and to
provide to scientists, engineers, and society
useful and easily implemented solutions to
complex problems.
A complementary challenge is to comprehend
the human dimensions associated with
knowledge networking communities.
Multidisciplinary knowledge networking efforts
will fail unless we understand and provide for
the learning environments that enable skill
sets, conceptual models, and values to be
rapidly shared across disparate fields.

Goals
Designing tools for gathering and analyzing
data. New types of tools are required to collect,
share, and manipulate increasingly complex
data sets and structures. Utilizing these tools
involves innovations in computing, advances in
telecommunications, and the development of
more sophisticated algorithms and
hardware/software systems.
Building the next generation of
representations. Data, information and
knowledge require increasingly complex
representations. New kinds of media are
required to enable the communications of new
types of messages and meanings. For example,
transforming symbolic information into sensory
form (e.g., visualization) necessitates
translating scientific and mathematical
notations into tangible modalities.
Extending the human infrastructure that
underlies knowledge networking. Generating
new ideas increasingly involves participants in
knowledge networks communicating with one
another in real time and obtaining data from
disaggregated sources. Expanding the
knowledge networking community to new
participants requires:
 Mastering a common language and a
generally accepted set of theories and
conceptual models (to provide a framework
for communication)
  Inculcating communally defined processes
of collecting and analyzing data (to enable
sharing and validating information)
 Developing proficiency in design,
reasoning, and argumentation (to facilitate
the evolution of ideas)
 Accepting a common set of values that
include respect for others' perspectives
and for intellectual property (to encourage
wide participation)

The Knowledge
Networking Initiative
Integrates Layers of
Achievement
The Knowledge Networking Initiative aims to
create the underlying science and the tools,
infrastructure, and distributed intellectual
processes to achieve the layered aims.
The overarching goal is improving our
understanding of and ability to manage larger
and more complex natural, social, and material
phenomena. Knowledge networking can
enhance the operations of many human
enterprises, with science and education the
most obviously relevant to NSF's mission. The
crucial added benefits that knowledge
networking brings to the scientific enterprises
are the abilities to:
 Couple models, knowledge, data,
instruments, and intellectual activity across
space, time, and disciplinary boundaries,
 Work with new types of content and
knowledge bases of radically increased
scope and scale,
 Enhance the overall cognitive ecology of
science and engineering.
Achieving these aims of coupling, scope, and
intellectual community depends critically upon
new levels of functionality in information
infrastructures. We need a better
understanding of how to push or pull relevant
information wherever, whenever and to
whomever it is useful; how to create true
semantic interoperability in heterogeneous
knowledge environments; and how to make
knowledge maximally accessible with new
modalities of interaction such as real-time
multimedia, visualization, and simulation.
Achieving such new functionality and making
them widespread and universally accessible
also requires re-conceptualizing the human
processes involved in creating and
disseminating knowledge. The groups involved
include data gathering enterprises such as field
research teams, observatories, and cyclotron
facilities; information transmission functions
such as messaging, publishing, and library
systems; and integrating/stabilizing
infrastructures such as standards and user
groups. Each type of human interaction in the
overall scientific process must alter if
knowledge networking is to reach its full
potential.

Examples of Social
Objectives and Relevance
Outcomes that could be
enabled by the Knowledge
Nets Initiative.
The following examples are potential outcomes
of Knowledge Networks. They illustrate the use
of science and technologies to meet larger
societal goals. These examples involve science
and the use of scientific information that are
possible only with the use of Knowledge
Networks. In addition the examples require
advancements in one or more of the
subsystems (such as social use of the new
knowledge, science modeling, data melding,
and real-time networks) from each of the top
three layers of the Framework .

Coping with Natural

Disasters
In 1995, twelve forest fire fighters died
tragically when they were trapped on the side
of a mountain in Colorado, unaware that
sudden changes in meteorological conditions
had caused a change in the path of the fire.
Although some data were available indicating a
shift in the fire, this information could not be
delivered to the scene of the fire in a timely
and clearly understood manner. The
enterprise, infrastructure and tools which
constitute the framework of the Knowledge
Nets (KN) initiative will enable an integrated
framework which does not exist today for
dealing with natural disasters, ultimately
leading to minimizing loss. Specifically, the KN
initiative could support the development of
coupled fire and atmospheric models. These
models require as input detailed knowledge of
topography, ground cover and synoptic
weather conditions. These data exist in various
data bases spread over the country and are
expressed in different formats. The result from
a simulation must be overlaid with the detailed
knowledge of the location of human and
physical resources. In cases where fire is near
more populated areas, as in the Oakland,
California fires, additional information about
the demographics and civil infrastructure must
be incorporated. Even if this synthesis of
rapidly changing information could be
assembled today, delivery to strategic
locations in an understandable form would still
be necessary to ensure benefit. The
infrastructure and tools components on the KN
initiative are "glue" that will enable the
effective management of natural disaster
situations.

Aviation Safety:
Delivery of current information to the cockpit
and proper pilot training are essential elements
in improving air safety and reducing operating
costs. Significant progress has been made in
pilot training and alerting pilots to potential life
threatening situations. Examples of improved
safety and reduced operating costs that could
result from the research supported by KN are:
1) At many airports in the US, information on
low-level wind shear coupled with Doppler
radar allows air traffic controllers to alert pilots
to unusual meteorological conditions.
Improvements to the current capabilities could
save additional lives and money for the airline
industry. The current information that is
assembled by air traffic controllers is of limited
predictive value and must be reduced to a few
numbers to allow the pilot to comprehend the
information in the cockpit during takeoffs and
landings. Synthesizing the results of models of
the atmosphere and air traffic into the cockpit
and control towers would allow the pilot and
controller to better prepare for approaches or
takeoffs through in-flight simulation of
conditions. In addition to offering improved
safety, this information will save significant fuel
costs because planes would not have to be
routed to different approaches at the last
minute due to changed conditions on the
ground. 2) The FAA is considering the
feasibility of free flight by commercial airlines.
This concept would allow aircraft to take the
most direct route between cities rather than
following established routes that pass
predetermined checkpoints. Essential for free-
flight are current information on weather
conditions, location of other aircraft and
conditions at airports along the route.
Gathering this information and synthesizing
and delivering it in a useful form is beyond our
current capability. The airline industry
estimates the annual savings, which may be
recognized by implementing free flight, is tens
of millions of dollars. 3) In-flight icing
conditions are difficult to detect and even more
difficult to predict. Several recent airline
disasters have been attributed to icing.
Improvements in the detection, prediction and
delivery systems available to the airline
industry are necessary to overcome this silent
threat. The enterprise, infrastructure and tools
that will be developed as part of the KN
initiative will accelerate the ongoing research
into in-flight icing.

Research Opportunities in
Knowledge Networking:
Knowledge Networking presents a number of
research challenges and opportunities. These
can be organized under a set of topics or
threads, which we have termed Interactivity,
Representation, Cognition, Agents, and
Corpora.

 Interactivity
Interactivity research studies the creation and
maintenance of dynamic, content-rich
relationships among people, instruments &
tools, data, and artificial agents, using multiple
modalities. Technologies that enable such
interactivity encompass input/output devices,
communication networks, and their interface
characteristics, adapted with the aim of making
the best match to what is known about the
needs and requirements of individual people,
groups, teams, and organizations for effective
interaction.
The critical multidisciplinary aspects of
Interactivity research result from the need to
uncover common foundations for
understanding widely differing types of
participants (e.g. people or agents with
particular skills; specialized instruments)
coupled through unique domain-specific
activities (e.g. doing geoscience or doing
disaster relief) integrating problem- and
domain-specific information (e.g., specialized
datasets or knowledge bases), via a variety of
media and channels (text, video, etc.), under a
range of specific constraints (e.g. quality-of-
service; sensory limitation such as no vision or
hearing, etc.). Another multidisciplinary driver
is the need to understand how to apply the
fruits of Interactivity research effectively in
many different domains.
New interdisciplinary Knowledge
Networking research under the
Interactivity thread includes:
 Access and "universal access"
 Body language and facial expression
capture/generation
 Dialogue and discourse structures and
constraints
 Ecological & virtual-environmental
interactions
 Image processing and gesture recognition
 Intermodal mappings for people with
disabilities
 Hap tics, smell, taste and balance
technologies
 Multimodal interactivity
 Network and communications
infrastructures for interactivity
 Remote access/control and teleoperation
 Signal processing and understanding
 Speech recognition and natural language
understanding
 Real-time and time-modified interactivity
 Valuation and incentives for interactivity

 Representation
Research on representation studies the
processes through which participants (people,
groups, agents, etc.) model and encode
knowledge about entities, processes, or
phenomena in particular representational
media, and, conversely, reconstruct meanings
and semantics for representations in their
contexts of use.
The critical multidisciplinary aspects of
Representation research result from the need
to uncover common foundations for
understanding how widely differing types of
participants (e.g. people or agents with
particular domain- or culture-specific
viewpoints; specialized data-gathering
instruments), represent problem- and domain-
specific entities or processes (e.g., protein
molecules; organizational workflows), of
differing representational level (e.g., sensory;
cognitive), scale and complexity, for use in
unique domain-specific activities (e.g. doing
bioscience or doing collaborative design) via a
variety of representational media and
modalities (text, software, graphical data,
simulations, in visual, audio, haptic modalities,
etc.), under a range of specific constraints (e.g.
size limitations, specificity constraints).
Another multidisciplinary driver is the need to
understand how to apply the fruits of
Representation research effectively in many
different domains.
New interdisciplinary Knowledge Networking
research under the Representation thread
includes:
Representation of new entities or attributes,
such as:
 Complex data types
 Complex systems and their structure
 Domain- and discipline-specific objects,
actions, and processes
 Gestures and facial expressions
 Human sensory information: touch, smell,
taste, and balance
 Illumination and rendering
 Know-how and commonsense knowledge
 Large-scale systems and phenomena
 Mathematics and logic
 Ontologies
 Open physical, computational and
biological systems
 Organizational processes and workflows
 Real world objects, processes and
environments
 Scientific principles, methods, and theories
 Uncertainty
Complex operations on representations, such
as:
  Automatic generation of representations
 Domain-independent abstraction (e.g., of
texts and images)
 Compression
 Integration, fusion and interoperability;
 Interpretation of representations in context
 Multimedia indexing, abstraction
 Translation of representations
New representational techniques and media
such as:
 Distributed representations
 Distributed interpretations
 Non-digital representational media such as
culture, the physical world, molecules and
Biological objects (e.g., DNA)
 Multiperspective representations
 Simulations and computer models
 Tools for joint or collaborative knowledge
construction and representation
New uses for representations

 Cognition
Cognition research investigates interlinked
processes of perception, reasoning, memory,
learning, and action by participants in physical
and socio-cultural situations.
The critical multidisciplinary aspects of
Cognition research result from the need to
uncover common foundations for integrated
understanding of all phases of cognition, as
carried out by a wide variety of cognitive
entities (e.g., people, artificial agents, groups,
organizations), cognizing (perceiving,
reasoning/learning about, acting with) domain-
specific phenomena of differing character,
scale and complexity (e.g. perception of
surface textures; organizational memory), in a
wide variety of physical and social contexts
(e.g. a laboratory, a crisis management
scenario) under a range of specific constraints
(e.g. complexity, realizability, or real-time
constraints). Another multidisciplinary driver is
the need to understand how to apply the fruits
of Cognition research effectively in many
different domains.
New interdisciplinary Knowledge Networking
research under the Representation thread
includes:
New cognizing entities:
 Cognition by individuals, groups, teams
and organizations
 Empirical studies of Knowledge networks
as arenas for scientific experimentation,
data gathering, analysis
  Human comprehension in networked
environments
 Organizational and community memory
systems
New objects of cognition such as:
 Behavior and event processing of non-rigid
objects
 Complex, distributed, and open systems
 Groups, teams, organizations, institutions
 Specific domain entities
 Tasks of high complexity
New cognitive issues and methods:
 Distributed cognition
 Dynamic adaptation
 Error processing and propagation;
 Exploiting parallel architectures for
computation;
 Focus of attention
 High-level reasoning;
 Knowledge-based information processing;
 Learning effects of human exposure to
virtual and real environments.
 Non-conceptual cognition;
 Perceptual, motor, and sensory-motor
models;
 Perception-based problem solving
 Reliability of cognitive models
 Situated cognition
  Symbolic and geometric processing;
 Transfer of learning; skill training and
acquisition
 Cognitive aspects of trust and believability

 Agents
Agent’s research studies the active and
sometimes physically embodied algorithms,
software, communications, and tools that can
assist people in Knowledge Networking
activities. Examples of agents include
knowledge agents that seek and manipulate
specific data or information collections ("Know
bots") from interconnected commuter
networks, and cooperative physical agents
such as robots, intelligent devices, special
instruments, and other non-human natural
agents or environments.
The critical multidisciplinary aspects of Agents
research result from the need to uncover
common foundations for understanding how to
support and augment a variety of people,
teams, groups, and organizations, each with
particular domain- or culture-specific needs, in
performing unique domain-specific activities
(e.g. doing bioscience, doing collaborative
design, or emergency management), using a
varied array of resources (scientific data sets,
distributed simulations, specialized
instruments), under a range of specific
constraints (e.g. time, methodological, or
performance quality constraints). Another
multidisciplinary driver is the need to
understand how to apply the fruits of Agents
research effectively in many different domains.
New interdisciplinary Knowledge Networking
research under the Agents thread includes:
 Autonomy
 Building (and dismantling) information-rich
virtual communities and organizations
 Domain-specific contextual knowledge and
commonsense knowledge for agents
 Coordination of activities and knowledge in
heterogeneous systems and environments
 Degrees and types of augmentation and
support for participants such as people,
teams, or organizations.
 Designs and criteria for sensory-motor
systems
 Distributed control
 Domain-specific contextual knowledge and
commonsense knowledge for agents
 Dynamic adaptation and evolution of
agents
 Engineering methodologies
 Interoperability of agents
 Incentive structures
 Knowledge at new scales: large collections
of tiny, heterogeneous distributed agents;
distributed knowledge networks for control
of MEMS
 Load and complexity management
 Mathematical algorithms, machine
architectures, and networking technologies
for knowledge agents in information spaces
 Multi-agent systems
 Modularity, parallelism and complexity
 Pathologies and immune systems in large-
scale human-computing aggregates, e.g.
malicious agents, viruses, junk, "knowledge
storms"
 Possible or optimal domain, range and
scope of the agents' functionality
 Principles of decomposition and
organization of tasks and resources
(division of labor)
 Robustness, fault-tolerance, and reliability
 Specific domain-dependent agents for
assisting in information analysis, decision
making, and remote control of instruments
and access to information resources
 Trust, confidence, and believability
 User, team, and organizational
requirements and their evolution.

 Co
rpora
Investigations of corpora (plural of "corpus")
research the entire lifecycle (creation,
structuring, storage, maintenance, use and
disposal) of general and community-specific
collections of data, information, and
knowledge, ranging across ad hoc data
collections, complex scientific databases, large
and distributed digital libraries and even such
unconventional entities as digital forms of
artifacts in museums. Research in Corpora is a
critical enabler of Knowledge Networking:
people's ability to access, retrieve and
comprehend information from complex
databases and sources depends on how that
information is created, structured, stored,
presented, and managed.
New interdisciplinary Knowledge Networking
research under the Corpora thread has two
objectives: To accelerate cross-disciplinary
database research, and to develop new kinds
of cross-disciplinary data-sharing mechanisms,
infrastructures, and relationships that can
facilitate new interdisciplinary experimental
research. Relevant research topics include:
 Active and real-time databases and data
sources
 Classification and taxonomizing processes
 Collection and indexing of retrospective
and real-time data sources
 Community, organizational, and social
filtering of information and knowledge
 Data and knowledge mining
 Dealing with evolution of structure,
function, content, and user requirements
 Digital libraries and repositories across
disciplines and application domains
 Disciplinary databases; multi-lingual, cross-
cultural, societal collections
 Dissemination and distribution
 Domain-specific taxonomies and ontology
 Dynamic synthesis of new structure, views,
and metadata
 Economics and valuation of information
and content
 Evolution of structure, function and content
 Experimental evaluation
 High-confidence and reliability
 Intellectual property rights and ownership
 Intelligent transaction processing
 Meta-data research
 Multi-modal information management
 Object and multimedia environments
 Organizations as active knowledge bases
 Public access policies
 Reliability, security, quality of data and
data services
 Searching, filtering, fusion, indexing and
retrieval tools
 Security and authorization
  Structure, functionality and organization of
corpora
 Technologies of intellectual property, e.g.,
"terms and conditions"
 Vertically and horizontally linked data
sources

End Note
In developing nations, where access to simple
technologies is terribly skewed in favor of the
economically privileged, harnessing and
spreading the potential of Information and
Communication Technologies for knowledge
based networking will continue to be a
daunting challenge. Participation of the private
sector, the creation, management and
dissemination of strategic information and data
pertaining to the various dimensions of
development- globally, regionally and
nationally and at community level is essential.
Ultimately, information and communication
technologies by itself cannot be an answer
and elixir to problems facing sustainable
development, but it does bring new
information resources and can open new
communication channels for the
marginalized communities. It offers a
means for bridging the information gaps
through initiating interaction and dialogue,
new alliances, inter-personal networks, and
cross-sectoral links between organizations.
It can create mechanisms that enable the
bottom-up articulation and sharing of local
knowledge. The benefits include increased
efficiency in allocation of resources for
development work, less duplication of
activities, reduced communication costs
and global access to information and
human resources.
SDNP-India through its functioning can
effectively facilitate knowledge based
networking but the degree to which people
in developing countries can benefit from
the networking potential to spread
knowledge, bring about good governance
and lead to sustainable development will
depend on how much support the
information-poor get to have access to the
networking process and the strength of the
complimentary human network. Further,
focusing on training, organizational
development and capacity building is often
more important than investing in the
technology itself. Communities must not
underestimate the critical importance of
building and maintain local capacity. It
needs to be recognized that capacity
building is a vital element of any
Information and Communication
Technologies-enabled development effort.
Thus building up of national human,
technical and economic capacities to
facilitate access to and utilization of
Information and Communication
Technologies should be central and
continuous element of community based
development efforts.