Digital libraries of community knowledge: the coming world of the Interspace

A global network for knowledge manipulation must support effective search, to locate relevant objects, and effective analysis, to correlate related objects. The Interspace is the coming global network, where knowledge manipulation is supported by concept navigation across community spaces. We have produced a working Interspace prototype, an analysis environment supporting semanic indexing on community repositories. Scalable technologies have been implemented for concept extraction, concept spaces, and concept switching. These technologies have been tested on discipline-scale, real-world document collections. The technologies use statistical clustering, on contextual frequency of phrases within documents. The practical basis of scalable semantics is context rather than meaning. This is part of a philosphical trend in pattern recognition from Western precise rules towards Eastern imprecise environments.