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Q. What is the General Knowledge System?
A. TheGeneral Knowledge System (GKS) is a knowledge tool. It supports a free form entry and organization of information using a text editor. In addition, it supports the identification of linkage among the information. It is this linkage which provides the knowledge. Human intelligence requires the ability to move smoothly from one thought to another. The links associate information which are relevant to solving a particular problem.
Knowledge needs to be relevant to solving the problem at hand to be of interest to the person (or machine) using the knowledge base. Effective problem solving requires a clear understanding of the problem, a defined objective and sufficient information to allow the discovery of an acceptable resolution to the problem. The knowledge base provides the storage space for the data, information and knowledge to bring to bear in solving the problems of the person using the General Knowledge System. The knowledge base is the organized experience of the user(s) of the system.
Human kind has been collecting information needed to solve problems for a long time. In the beginning, there was a lack of information and a great deal of time was spent trying to discover information. Today, there is a vast amount of information available and people spend a great deal of time trying to learn about what is already known and trying to determine if the known information is useful to solving the particular problem at hand. In order to improve the efficiency of this process, human kind needs to publish and organize the known information.
The world wide web is the focus of a great deal of effort toward this goal. At the current stage of development, more progress has been made with publishing than with organizing. The users of the web still find a vast array of information but a limited amount of knowledge.
The General Knowledge System is an attempt to provide the individual a tool to organize the information of interest to that person. Each person will find a particular set of knowledge useful is solving the problems of interest to that person. No two knowledge bases will be identical.
Q. Why have a General Knowledge System?
A. To perform the following functions:
Q. How is the knowledge base organized?
A. While the underlying tool imposes no particular structure to the knowledge base, the General Knowledge System is built with a knowledge framework implicit in its operation.
Information is entered into the knowledge base in a textual format. Normally, in complete sentences as would be used in spoken communication to another person, written in correspondence to another person, or as written to be retained for future reference by the author of the information. The smallest unit of information is the Node.
A Node usually contains one or more complete thoughts. Nodes are then grouped into Topics. The Topic is stored in the implementing computer system as a File. The Nodes in a Topic should contain thoughts which are relevant to the Topic name.
The Topics are then grouped by Subject.
The Subjects placed into Groups.
And the collection of Groups form a Knowledge Base (KwB).
The General Knowledge System works with a single knowledge base. However, several knowledge bases may reside on a single computer system.
Q. Does this program run on the Intranet as well as the Internet?
A. Yes, General Knowledge System runs in a Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows NT environment. It is configured to share the knowledge base on a Local Area Network. In addition, each user may have their own private section of the knowledge base. Access to the Internet is provided by a web browser in the case of HTML. Data to be shared between the two environments could be moved by normal copy/paste windows functions. If you wanted to distribute knowledge bases to other users, using either the Internet or Intranet, the knowledge base can be transported as native knowledge base files. In its current form, the knowledge base is a set of ASCII files. The knowledge in General Knowledge System is displayed to the user as a series of "pages" in a manner similar to web pages.
Q. Is GKS able to do searches with a very brief description?
A. A Find function will locate words in the current page. A Locate function will locate any Node which contains a given key phrase in either the Node name or the Node title. Knowledge is organized into Topics and Nodes. The Topic is a collection of Nodes, where each Node contains the information displayed on a page. There is an index for Topics and an index for Nodes. These can be located by name as well.
Q. Does GKS support automatic scanning and indexing all words in text files?
A. No, only topics and links in the knowledge base.