Knowledge and its articulations are strongly influenced by diversity in, e.g., cultural backgrounds, schools of thought, geographical contexts. 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).

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.

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

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

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, and it will be enabled by state of the art search technology (provided by Yahoo!).

Partners:

• Università degli Studi di Trento
• Fundació Barcelona Media Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Yahoo! Research Barcelona)
• Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per le Telecomunicazioni
• Stichting European Archive
• Università degli studi di Pavia
• University of Southampton
• Documentation Research and Training Center
• Indian Statistical Institute
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover (L3S Research Center)
• Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V.

The LivingKnowledge project is sponsored by the EU Seventh Framework Programme.