The significance of this development is profound in two ways:
1. It immensely simplifies the generation of a user interface, since the web browser handles all formatting, graphics, and viewing. The size of the Untangle Project team would have precluded a usable interface otherwise.
2. The actual data in the knowledge-base can be shared. Any number of people, anywhere on the net, can access the data and see live results in a presentation format (HTML) they are familiar with. Most knowledge bases can only be used by a single person at a time.
The project focused its early stages on developing a web interface for Classic. This interface displays concept and individual descriptions as dynamic web pages - the HTML is generated on the fly to reflect the state of the Classic object at the time of the query. References to other concepts or individuals in these descriptions are hot links to the functions that will display them. Concept taxonomies can also be displayed as nested HTML lists. Within concept or individual descriptions, role taxonomies are displayed as nested HTML lists as well.
KR systems are well known for producing lots of information, much of which is not useful to a person. The interface suppresses a lot of this using per-concept meta-information to control which roles are displayed. It also by default suppresses the display of information inherited along the role hierarchies if the original information is also displayed. All this default behavior can be overridden by the user using forms accessible through every description page.
The interface also overrides the default display of an individual if any of that individual's parents have a display-function. The purpose of this is particularly for information-items. The roles of an information item typically link it to the object or event the information is about, and the views of that piece of information. For example, the individuals Chris-resume and Chris-resume.html from Figure 1 are shown below:
Chris-resume::
(and information-item description
(fills information-item-of Chris)
(fills has-information-view
Chris-resume.html
Chris-resume.ps))
Chris-resume.html::
(and information-view html-view
(fills information-view-of Chris-resume)
(fills URL
"http://www.cs.vassar.edu/..."))
A user will rarely want to see these actual descriptions. When interested in a particular information item, such as Chris-resume, a user will want to see the information itself. Every information view has a URL role which is filled with a string that identifies the location of the information. When a user (through various mechanisms such as the result of a query or clicking on a role in another individual) selects an information item to be viewed, the display function for information-items bypasses the actual individual description, retrieves the string from the URL slot of the item's view, and passes that back to the web browser (which should know what to do with a URL). If the item has more than one view, as is the case in the example above, the display function generates an HTML list in which each item is a link to the URL of one of the views. In other words, it lets the user choose the view.
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