Knowledge and its articulations are strongly influenced by diversity in, e.g., cultural backgrounds, schools of thought, geographical contexts. Judgements, assessments and opinions, which play a crucial role in many areas of democratic societies, including politics and economics, reflect this diversity in perspective and goals. For the information on the Web (including, e.g., news and blogs) diversity - implied by the ever increasing multitude of information providers - is the reason for diverging viewpoints and conflicts. Time and evolution add a further dimension making diversity an intrinsic and unavoidable property of knowledge.

The vision inspiring LivingKnowledge is to consider diversity an asset and to make it traceable, understandable and exploitable, with the goal to improve navigation and search in very large multimodal datasets (e.g., the Web itself). LivingKnowledge will study the effect of diversity and time on opinions and bias, a topic with high potential for social and economic exploitation. We envisage a future where search and navigation tools (e.g., search engines) will automatically classify and organize opinions and bias (about, e.g., global warming or the Olympic games in China) and, therefore, will produce more insightful, better organized, easier-to-understand output.

LivingKnowledge employs interdisciplinary competences from, e.g., philosophy of science, cognitive science, library science and semiotics. The proposed solution is based on the foundational notions of context and its ability to localize meaning, and the notion of facet, as from library science, and its ability to organize knowledge as a set of interoperable components (i.e., facets). The project will construct a very large testbed, integrating many years of Web history and value-added knowledge, state-of-the-art search technology and the results of the project. The testbed will be made available for experimentation, dissemination, and exploitation.

The overall goal of the LivingKnowledge project is to bring a new quality into search and knowledge management technology, which makes search results more concise, complete and contextualised. On a provisional basis, we take as referring to the process of compacting knowledge into digestible elements, completeness as meaning the provision of comprehensive knowledge that reflects the inherent diversity of the data, and contextualisation as indicating everything that allows us to understand and interpret this diversity.

To achieve this goal, the LivingKnowledge project will pursue the following challenging scientific and technological objectives:

• its sources and its effects by combining know-how and experiences from areas such as media research, multimodal information theory, information and library science, natural language processing and multimedia data analysis, developing an interdisciplinary foundation for dealing systematically with diversity and its impact in search and retrieval of information.

• detecting bias in text and in the use of multimedia as a reflection of the diversity as well as for analysing and tracing the underlying diversity, lineage and the bias and trustworthiness of sources.

• developing methods for analysing the temporal binding of facts and opinions as well as the evolution of knowledge - considering evolution in articulated facts as well as evolution in the means for knowledge articulation and structuring.

• a new generation of search technology that supports the opinion-aware, diversity-aware and time-aware aggregation and exploration of knowledge.

We will further explore requirements and evaluate our progress by applying the technology we develop to the LivingKnowledge testbed. The LivingKnowledge testbed will contain a large amount of timed, diverse and biased knowledge constructed in many years of Web evolution (provided by the European Archive), and it will be enabled by state of the art search technology (provided by Yahoo!).

We will further explore requirements and evaluate our progress by applying the technology we develop to the LivingKnowledge testbed. The LivingKnowledge testbed will itself be a major, not easily replicable, outcome of the project as it will contain a large amount of timed, diverse and biased knowledge constructed in many years of Web evolution, (provided by the European Archive), and it will be enabled by state of the art search technology (provided by Yahoo!). To show its usefulness we will exploit the testbed in two complementary applications, which will exploit the technology developed in the project. Our Future Predictor will combine and test all methods necessary to answer factual queries regarding future events and statements, based on information available already on the Web. Our Media Research Analyser will address questions about the public image of a company, possibly changing over time, or the effectiveness of a PR campaign as reflected through user generated content in blogs and other public forums. The testbed and the two pilot applications will be the basis for the future exploitation of both the testbed and the technology developed in the project.

Keywords: Diversity, bias, time and evolution, opinions, context, facets, pattern recognition, knowledge management, search.

This project is sponsored by the EU Seventh Framework Programme