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Welcome to Nooron
Nooron is free (LGPLed) software which aims to provide a platform for collaboration on a global scale. The theory behind this effort is that a way to achieve such inclusiveness while also promoting quality is to create the mother-of-all-peer-review-systems and apply it to flexible, distributed knowledge representation. Unlike the majority of collaborative filtering systems, Nooron is based on user-extensible criteria (dimensions along which evaluations -- ratings -- may occur.) An unprecedented (except in biology) level of self-organization is expected to result from diligent application of criteria-based filtering to nearly every aspect of the system. Here's a simple inductive argument for suspecting that a cascade of amelioration and diversification is likely. Start off with a distributed knowledge representation system into which ontologies as well as application components are thrown. Apply a general purpose, omnidirectional improvement mechanism to all the contents of the system. Where does it stop?
A Worked Example
UML Class Diagram
is the class diagram for:
Computing Systems Ontology
which is the reusable underpinning for:
History of Visual Computing Systems
which is best visualized as:
Computing Systems Lineage
which (after some more data entry) be more flexible and useful than:
Bushy Tree Diagram
because it can also automatically be published as a book:
Computing Systems
or displayed as detail web pages:
Generic Display Of Smalltalk
and, among a great many other things, display the relations between the various knowledge bases involved:
KB Ancestry
What is Nooron?
I finally got really annoyed with how hard it is for people to think clearly together. So I decided to [try to] solve the problem once and for all [cue mad-scientist-music] by creating an online digital ecosystem in which knowledge, logic and presentation can all evolve in a globe-spanning, self-organizing, peer to peer system of web servers which is simultaneously the handiest, most flexible piece of software everybody[!] uses and also the software substrate for an emergent global collective intelligence. Take your pick. See How to Build a Global Brain for an expanded form of this vision. [Best keep the mad-scientist-music playing though.] The somewhat more sober Nooron White Paper covers the motivation for Nooron rather well, but is otherwise quite out of date.
Starting points:
- The Nooron Pattern Language describes the design principles used in Nooron. It even has a cool graph (generated by Nooron).
- The Nooron Project is being managed using Software Project Management facilities implemented in Nooron. There is currently support for PERT charts (automatically generated, of course) and UseCases. (Scenarios coming soon!) This is all built on the generic Project Management ontology and illustrates the utility of the 'Nooron Architecture' for the construction of modular ontologies and modular reconfigurable applications.
- The Nooron FAQ answers questions like "What is Nooron?" and "Nooron is still very alpha, though, isn't it?"
- To learn how to create so-called 'Nooron Apps' see: Nooron App Architecture. It is instructive to examine a graph generated by Nooron (and rendered by GraphViz) showing the knowledge-base 'ancestry' of "smurp's web log".
- Here are some more example Nooron Apps:
Features from the Future
This is a rough roadmap of projected Nooron versions; the features that users will be able to enjoy and which technologies Nooron will incorporate to make that enjoyment possible. The versions in green are in the past, those in red are in the future.| version | users can | incorporates |
|---|---|---|
| pyokbc-0.1.0 | model knowledge | OKBC, Python, |
| nooron-0.2.x | publish knowledge | Medusa, ZPT, |
| nooron-0.3.x | manage knowledge | ThroughTheWebEditing, |
| nooron-0.?.x | manage knowledge applications | |
| nooron-0.?.x | share knowledge applications | CentralAppRegistry, |
| nooron-0.?.x | express opinions | CriteriaAndEvaluations, |
| nooron-0.?.x | make decisions | |
| nooron-0.?.x | improve knowledge | Versioning, |
| nooron-0.?.x | be an intellectual tourist | WorldViews, |
| nooron-0.?.x | collaborate globally | PyKQML, |
Current Version
This version (nooron-0.2.x) can be considered a knowledge publishing system.
Knowledge in, documents out.
The knowledge must currently be in an unusual format
(.pykb),
but any new
PyOKBC
backends will work with Nooron. There is also read-only access to the
contents of .brn files from The Brain.
It will be relatively easy to write backends for many kinds of
knowledge source including (but not limited to):
RDF, TopicMaps, Cyc, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Bibtex, IMAP, LDAP,
WordNet, PDB, CSV, CVS and nearly every other structured source.
Likewise, Nooron can generate basically any kind of output;
HTML, XML and other
similar formats directly via 'Garments'
(with are essentially
Zope Page Templates
without the Zope and stuffed with OKBC calls)
or thereafter into anything that a command line
utility can generate from the Garment output. At the moment that includes:
GraphViz .dot files, Docbook, Postscript, PDF and JPG, but it
is completely open-ended because the whole
transformer
system is knowledge driven.
Downloads
Background and Historical
Noosphere.org was the home of this project before it became self-hosting. Useful places there include:
- the Nooron Wiki (which was mostly just a scratch-pad while working on Nooron) contains some stuff that might still be true, but lots of outdated stuff too
- Background documents including old papers and vision statements
- the Roadmap which has been replaced by the The Nooron Project PERT.
Sponsors
Nooron is being employed by The Uplift Academy (www.upspace.org) to provide the technology for Tom Munnecke's profound and rapidly evolving Uplift Linguistic Shell.Thanks
Gerri Aiudi, Marsh Murphy, Tom Munnecke, Chris Crowley, George Bradford, David Boroditsky, Michael McDonnell, Michael Best and Brent Flesher.Contact
Nooron is the effort of Shawn F. Murphy. Please direct email to interest@nooron.org.How to Help
- Download it, try it, tell me what to fix.
- Write a PyOKBC backend. Especially useful would be a generic PostgreSQL backend.
- Create interesting Nooron Apps (just scratch your own itch!)
- Optimize PyOKBC.
- Advise on how to implement capability-based security in this context.
- Use Nooron to publish a website.
- Commission features, purchase training or make a donation to fund this work.
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