Space-time databases modeling global semantic networks

Abstract

This paper represents an approach to creating global knowledge systems, using new philosophy and infrastructure of global distributed semantic network (frame knowledge representation system) based on the space-time database construction. The main idea of the space-time database environment introduced in the paper is to bind a document (an information frame, a knowledge) to a special kind of entity, that we call permanent entity, -- an object without history and evolution, described by a "point" in the generalized, informational space-time (not an evolving object in the real space having history). For documents (information) it means that document content is unchangeable, and documents are absolutely persistent. This approach leads to new knowledge representation and retreival techniques. We discuss the way of applying the concept to a global distributed scientific library and scientific workspace. Some practical aspects of the work are elaborated by the open IT project at http://sourceforge.net/projects/gil/.