A practical example of this is the website of the Software Systems and Processes group at Edinburgh. In the same spirit the Open University have a project KMi Planet that is an online newspaper managed entirely by intelligent agent software, and D3E, a tool for non-technical users to publish WWW documents for debate. Southampton's Multimedia Research Group has developed a multimedia authoring and presentation tool, Microcosm Each of these approaches promises a great deal for the future of knowledge publishing. We now move on to a final knowledge challenge. The Challenge of Knowledge Maintenance Knowledge has a shelf life.
Some knowledge has considerable longevity while other content changes very quickly.
The challenge is to know when and how to update, and to be able to predict the consequences of any changes. Intriguingly there is scope to model the equivalent of forgetting in our knowledge systems. Shadbolt's group has examined collaborative ontology construction tools, highlighting consensus, conflicts and design rationales. John Kingston at Edinburgh is involved in the US High Performance Knowledge Bases project, building and testing tools to cope with the problems of scale. The research agenda of this IRC is to address the six challenges laid out above in an integrated approach.