TIMING IS EVERYTHING

Timely information has greater value. Cutting-edge technology company True Knowledge is developing a highly efficient question-answering tool that quickly provides you with the data you require, that looks set to transform the way we search for time-sensitive factual information on the Internet.

One of the biggest obstacles to finding accurate answers quickly online is that facts change with time, and websites often contain old or outdated information. It is predicted that as the Internet ages, this absence of 'time stamping' will prove to be a serious problem. Rather than creating a structured archive where historic information can be accessed in context, the Internet is growing as a chaotic jumble of information, with temporary data such as stock prices and news headlines mixed up or missing entirely.

"Finding today's share prices on the Internet is an easy thing to do," says William Tunstall-Pedoe, founder of True Knowledge. "But finding the same information from last week, or last year, can be much harder. Our structured approach, which applies temporal information to every fact in our knowledge-base, means that locating specific, time-sensitive information becomes a much easier task.

"A trivial example is to ask if Brad Pitt was married in 2003. True Knowledge will simply answer 'yes' as it knows the start and end dates of his marriage to Jennifer Aniston. Other search engines will struggle with the question because they don't understand the information on the web-pages they index and cannot apply temporal rules.

"The engine can also use the time-sensitive facts that it stores to calculate specific ages or dates when required," adds William. "If I ask it 'how old was the Queen in 1955?' it will tell me that she was 29 years old."

Unlike other web-based question-answering services the responses that True Knowledge provides are generated afresh each time from the most up-to-date facts in the system. This means that True Knowledge can infer answers based on complementary knowledge - for instance, it can work out the names of the Queen's grandchildren by knowing the branches of her family tree, without ever having been explicitly told who they are.

"There is so much information online, but it's often virtually impossible to find the answer you're looking for because of the lack of structure," says William. "True Knowledge is organising information in a way that both machines and people can understand, so that it can take the hard work out of searching by directly providing accurate answers to questions.

"Many organisations hold historical information that would have a commercial value if it was accessible to others. True Knowledge is developing a method whereby such information could be made available in a systematic, ordered way, providing a new revenue stream from an existing, untapped resource.

"We are at last making the Internet into a useful, ordered repository of human knowledge, with benefits for both information-holders and researchers."

Currently in beta-testing, the True Knowledge fact-base already contains over 95 million facts. For more information, or to sign up for a beta account, visit www.trueknowledge.com

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