Sumathi Gopal2
This paper is based on the masters thesis ``Aristotle and the Knowledge Web'' [1]. The Knowledge Web was motivated by the developement of an online classroom called Aristotle for a Biology course of Rutgers university. Aristotle is built using HTML and JavaScript and it presents the course by dividing it into lectures. The lecture webpages contain hyperlinks to topics and keywords. Although this method is fairly effective in conveying course content, it does not portray logical relationships between topics and keywords. It also lacks interactivity that comes from a teacher in a conventional classroom. This paper describes the design and implementation of The Knowledge Web which overcomes the above mentioned shortcomings. It graphically potrays concepts and topics. It presents an integrated view of the multitude of information available pertaining to a certain topic. The information may be in different multimedia formats. The Knowledge Web differs from traditional schemes of Knowledge Representation, as it does not deal with assimilation and construction of a knowledge domain. The Knowledge Web assumes that pieces of information already exist, and they have been categorised into separate topics. On the other hand, representation of topics and their relationships in a knowledge web is similar to the representation of objects and their associations in Cognitive Maps. The knowledge web representation is close to the way information is represented in a human mind. Thus The Knowledge Web aids in meta-cognition. Two applications have been designed and implemented to construct and navigate through knowledge webs. These are : The Knowledge Web Composer to construct knowledge webs and the Knowledge Web Navigator to view and browse through knowledge webs. A prototype of the Knowledge Web has been implemented.