Knowledgeweb | a Design and Feasibility Study

Training people on science and engineering as well as providing scienti c and engineering solutions are key abilities in the technology-driven development of our society. Recent innovations in global networking and, in particular, the creation of the World-Wide Web and the widespread use of mobile-code technology, put a new generation of software systems within our reach, which promise a new quality of knowledge dissemination and absorption. Herein we document our design of a combined software technology basis and content creation methodology (tentatively named KnowledgeWeb) that addresses both modern education methods and distributed solution providers in the area of science and engineering. In accordance with the twofold goal, we propose two main technologies: active books and knowledge on demand. The rst component, active books, blurs the distinction between traditional textbooks and educational software by integrating content-dependent software into the static text (like, for example, a computer algebra system into a textbook on mathematics). The result is a new medium, which assists the student in acquiring the desired knowledge. The second component, knowledge on demand, does not aim at teaching knowledge, but at providing knowledge encoded in solvers, i.e., software components that realize solution procedures, such as constraint solvers, data-mining procedures, and so on. In other words, it favours a black-box approach to knowledge dissemination in contrast to the whitebox approach of active books. These solvers may be spread over the global network, some of them may require special hardware resources like supercomputers. For many problems a set of solvers has to be combined into concerted operation, and moreover, a convenient user-interface is needed. 3