The contributions of this work are threefold:
* Making KR technology available on the WWW can potentially demonstrate to a much larger community the practical benefits of using KR&R. This paper has described a user interface that is completely generic to Classic, and has been used for other Classic knowledge-bases, yet is flexible enough to support the display of objects outside the representation (actual web pages, in this case). It provides a "look and feel" that is familiar to a very large and still growing community. Web interfaces to KR systems will be a prerequisite for success of any knowledge sharing system in the future.
* The ontology for electronic information merged with a subject taxonomy carries the standard bibliographic ontology [Gruber, 1994] one step further. After further practical testing and use, the new ontology will undergo more formal and rigorous analysis for submission to the Ontolingua Ontology Library [Gruber, 1993].
* The application domain for this project is quite real, and by no means of a toy scale. While Untangle is not near the size of, e.g. Yahoo, this is simply a matter of manpower. The size of the knowledge-base grows daily, and new uses and benefits of the deep ontology and inference capabilities are constantly being found.
The original motivation for moving this research from Email distribution [Welty, 1994a] to the WWW was to demonstrate to the Digital Library community that KR techniques can improve on what is being done with Information Retrieval (IR) [Welty, 1994b]. The Untangle Project therefore hopes to be a showcase for KR&R. This will be tough going, Digital Libraries and the WWW in general are strongly tied to IR, but the deeper knowledge and inference capabilities that characterize KR do have quite a bit more to offer.
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