Current Projects
I am the senior developer and architect in the Knowledge Discovery Laboratory,
located in the Computer
Science Department at the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Our main project is Proximity,
a platform for relational knowledge discovery (see the Software page).
My personal interest is to develop a Semi-Structured, Self-Structuring
graph database (objects, links, and attributes) that can be used for personal
research and information-keeping. This database would support distributed
objects with seamless graph processing. My working title is POW - the
Personal Object Web. It is my belief that such a system
would be inherently more powerful that today's PIMs (Personal I
nformation Managers), and would offer some incredible new features.
I've looked at hundreds of PIMs and found a very small number that support
explicit links between pieces of information. (Two programs, Lotus Agenda
and Corel InfoCentral 7.0 had some of the ideas, but they are no longer
available. You might look at the work being done my Kapor at http://www.osafoundation.org/)
However, even these miss significant crucial aspects of our ideas - attributes
on objects and links, dynamic typing, and self-structuring using
machine learning techniques.