What is Nooron?
Nooron is Web software enabling people to collaboratively capture, explore, visualize, organize, filter and analyze knowledge. It is an open, computer-aided think-tank. It provides a framework within which participants present ideas, connect them to other ideas, devise criteria for idea evaluation, and then evaluate them. The resulting storehouse of assertions and opinions can then be navigated, filtered and visualized in new ways. Nooron supports the capture or importation of conventional facts and figures, and is 'knowledge based,' meaning that it uses Knowledge Representation technology to store richly complex and interrelated information.
Nooron is intended to be a suite of free (LGPLed) software clients and servers which together would form a system for magnifying collective human intelligence. It can help a small team work smarter, or a large population to collaboratively manage, analyze and improve combined knowledge. It is designed to integrate users and their knowledge into an evolving system, capable of improving ideas, and even improving the software used to manage those ideas. Unlike the majority of collaborative filtering systems, Nooron is based on user-extensible criteria to facilitate self-organization and evolutionary improvements.
Version 1.0.0 Features
- A pervasive collaborative filtering system, based on user-contributed criteria and evaluations, providing the advantages of both peer review and evolutionary pressure on all knowledge, logic and presentation contained within the system.
- User specified filtering of evaluations and the ability to summarize and weigh multiple evaluations, as well as user filtering of evaluators within particular knowledge domains.
- Automatically generated, knowledge driven, data management forms to aid the creation of new Nooron Apps, which can be created with new ontologies, rather than through creating new 'Add' and 'Edit' screens.
- Software fully automatic and adjustable because it will, throughout, be sensitive to settings which will be guided by world views or specific criteria, if not explicitly overridden by user preferences.
- User identity and preference system, called Not So Basic Authentication, will permit users to log onto any Nooron server without ever having to register. Just by entering the system, the URL of a knowledge-base will contain pertinent identity information and preferences, instead of using a specified user ID.
- Nooron apps' constituents (ontologies, wardrobes, garments, data) and criteria, world views, review boards, etc., will be able to propagate among Nooron servers in realtime.
- Access to legacy data will be available via PyOKBC backends for: generic PostgreSQL databases, PyOKBC-specific PostgreSQL, generic MySQL databases, remote knowledge-bases, generic python object systems (ala clos-kb in okbc-lisp) and any other PyOKBC (or OKBC) backends the community creates
- Applications for 'Project Management', 'Scenario Planning' and 'Bug Tracking'
Project History and Status
Nooron was developed from 2002 to 2006 using Python and PyOKBC, and was based on a number of experimental software projects developed from 1995 to 2001. Version 0.2.9 was completed and implemented as a knowledge publishing system, delivering knowledge in multiple formats, including HTML, GraphViz, Docbook, Postscript, PDF and JPG.
Work on Nooron, as described above, has been suspended. Many of its features and much of its software architecture, however, forms the foundation of new collaborative, criteria-based, software projects currently being developed.
For More Information
If you are interested in learning more about the Nooron project, or other projects at Noosphere.org, please contact interest@noosphere.org