The Knowledge Engine is a experimental media integration platform built to empower institutions and enterprises which create, manage, and deliver information. It is a robust data and user management and delivery system for vertical-market, scaleable hybrid media products.

The Knowledge Engine was conceived and prototyped at the British Columbia Institute of Technology and New York University during 1998-99, and has been in experimental use in a number of projects since.

Designed for multi-user environments, the Knowledge Engine offers an infrastructure that allows every contributor, developer, and administrator to create, retrieve and manage media and information - and deliver it seamlessly to end-users. It provides unique structuring and navigational capabilities combined with sophisticated search functionality. The user interface of the Knowledge Engine combines contet-sensitive data delivery with retrieval software and routines into a robust personal information agent.

The Knowledge Engine is a philosophy of representation and access to information. Its conceptual basis is the model of the information space as a graph whose nodes store information, and whose connections represent semantic relationships. The information stored in its rich hypermedia system should encompasses all media that computers can process, including text, graphics, animation, video, and sound. The Knowledge Engine thus combines the elements of radio - audio; television - audio/video; newspapers, magazines, and books - text/graphics; and the computer - processing/display terminal; with context-generative interaction to form the basis for a unique computer-mediated environment.

Improving business processes, saving time and money, boosting productivity and strengthening user/customer relationships are just a few of the ways this technology delivers a competitive advantage. The Knowledge Engine significantly reduces the cost of managing and maintaining websites and other information applications. Electronic publishing, Internet commerce, teleteaching, customer support, and online documentation are just a few applications of such a system. Using a server's processing capabilities and the Knowledge Engine's hypermedia consistency, integrated search capacity, meta-information storage, and extensibility enable delivery of a unique and powerful toolset.

The traditional boundaries between print, broadcast, and online information provider are rapidly becoming blurred. A feature of the Knowledge Engine is a series of content applications that repurpose information for different services, and tailor it according to individually generated interest profiles. The potential for revenue generation from these services is enormous, not only from interactive display and classified advertising, and subscription and syndication services. Knowledge Engine tools are equally at home in education, entertainment, and business environments. Organizations, institutions and companies can exploit its capabilities to develop processes and applications within a relatively short time scale, through the strategic implementation of its hypermedia systems for editorial, database and media applications, groupware and inter-personal productivity applications, relational databases, and telecommunications.

Knowledge Engine Architecture

¶ At the core of the Knowledge Engine is a proprietary data library machine holding metamedia and structured hypermedia elements.
¶ An access and accounting intermediary enables access control, commerce capabilities, and user tracking and intelligence.
¶ An agent module inserts a computational environment near the library to which users delegate rights, resources, and tasks for subscription and syndication purposes.
¶ A telecommunications matrix consists of facilities for user communication with the library machine, with other users, and, through a variety of connections, to existing networks and protocols for identifying communicating parties and accessing remote data.
¶ A user-machine level includes a local interface acting as a cache and workspace for hypermedia material, together with support for local filtering and display agents, incorporating or subject to any of a variety of user devices.

As of January 2003, development of the Knowledge Engine ceased. Certain elements have subsequently been integrated into the Information Utility architecture. For more information on Media Futures Institute projects and services, please fill in the form below: