Blog: NCSA Researchers Receive Patent for System that Finds Holes in Knowledge Bases

NCSA Researchers Receive Patent for System that Finds Holes in Knowledge Bases
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (08/03/09) Dixon, Vince

Researchers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have received a patent for a method of determining the completeness of a knowledge base by mapping the corpus and locating weak links and gaps between important concepts. NCSA research programmer Alan Craig and former NCSA staffer Kalev Leetaru were building databases using automatic Web crawling and needed a way of knowing when to stop adding to the collection. "So this is a method to sort of help figure that out and also direct that system to go looking for more specific pieces of information," says Craig. Using any collection of information, the technique graphs the data, analyzes conceptual distances within the graph, and identifies parts of the corpus that are missing important documents. The system then suggests what concepts may best fill those gaps, creating a link between two related concepts that might otherwise not have been found. Leetaru says this system helps users complete knowledge bases with information they are initially unaware of. Leetaru says the applications for this method are limitless, as the corpus does not have to be computer-based and the method can be applied to any situation involving a collection of data that users are not sure is complete.

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