Note

Please note that everything on this site (except the text on this page) is being generated on the fly, from knowledge, including all graphics, PDFs, Postscript, RTF, TeX and so on, everything.

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.
The Nooron Pattern Language Graph

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:
- smurp's web log is a web_log_app

In case it wasn't obvious, all of the above knowledge bases (except the Nooron App Architecture itself) are Nooron App Instances. All the knowledge in this Nooron is available under /know.

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.


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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.

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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