The Global Perpetual Dictionary of Everything

Helen Ashman, Associate Professor, School of Computer and Information Science, University of South Australia. Email: Helen.Ashman@unisa.edu.au

Dong Zhou, PhD student, Department of Computer Science, Nottingham University, United Kingdom. Email: dxz@cs.nott.ac.uk

James Goulding, Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, Nottingham University, United Kingdom. Email: jog@cs.nott.ac.uk

Timothy Brailsford, Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, Nottingham University, United Kingdom. Email: tjb@cs.nott.ac.uk

Mark Truran, Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, Teesside University, United Kingdom. Email: m.a.truran@tees.ac.uk

Keywords

Knowledge organisation, clustering, retrieval, classification, emergent intelligence.

Abstract

Knowledge organising systems aim to classify, store, organise and structure data for the purposes of retrieval. They usually rely on algorithms designed to automate these functions. However a largely untapped but highly accurate resource which can contribute enormously to these tasks is the mass of human intelligence which daily accesses that data. User consensus and judgement, or "co-active intelligence" is the emergent property arising from this mass human interaction with data, and there are now under development algorithms which exploit the consensus arising from this interaction. In particular, this consensus can be used to determine meaning, and can be used directly in search tools but can also contribute to the building of a complete, organic dictionary of almost anything that appears on the Web.

The primary advantage of co-active intelligence in the derivation of meaning is that it does not rely on increasingly complex sets of language-use rules, which must otherwise be elicited, represented and calculated. All such rules, while operating in co-active systems, are wholly implicit and are only ever activated by users applying their own judgement, thus never needing to be elicited. Co-active intelligence bypasses the explicit representation and automatic calculation of language-use rules, and acts only as a mediator between question and answer, leaving humans to answer the queries of human questioners.