Give me a subject and some hard-working agents and I will create a mighty force of knowledge
This project was created mostly for fun. It is inspired by Hollywood movies such the Bourne trilogy, where poor Jason has to evade a wide net of information gathering technologies. This project is an attempt to recreate some of these technologies at home as a proof of concept.
Knowledge gathering requires coordination
Information gathering makes no sense without a subject, since it has not bounds and there would be no way to distinguish between important information an unimportant information.
Furthermore, a protocol is needed to coordinate the work of any number of agents working together to collect information about the subject.
Any survey starts with a subject. The more narrow the scope the more manageable the survey will be to execute.
Subject is Jason Bourne
Information gathering needs one or more questions:
What are things that relate to the subject?
Once the subject and scope has been set, a coordinated dance of a thousand agents will begin. Some agents will know how to read cameras. Other agents will know how to trawl through websites. Yet others will know how to extract faces from images and concepts and entities from raw text.
The protocol goes something like follows:
BEGIN SURVEY
SET SUBJECT
SET QUESTION
BROADCAST TO AGENTS
COLLECT ANSWERS
END SURVEYTo be continued...
Man skal krybe, før man kan gå - Danish proverb
A protocol for knowledge gathering is worthless without the capability to gather information. In this section, we will look at some demos for gathering information.
| Source | Object types | Howto page |
|---|---|---|
| Computer peripherals | faces, speech, location | PERIPHERAL |
| HTML pages | text, images | SCRAPING |
| Web cameras | images, video | WEBCAM |
| Wikipedia | entities, text, images | todo |
| OpenStreetMap | entities | todo |