Challenges in Commercializing Expert Knowledge Authoring

Talk by Vinay Chaudhri @LogOnto

Development Process (cyclics including these steps)

·         Determining relevance and pre-planing

·         Reaching consensus

·         Encoding planning

·         Encoding

·         Key term review

·         Question-based testing

Team: 90% biologists 10% technical staff

 

Challenge 1: Long-term innovation / it requires Culture change

Ontology-based qusetion answering is too radical a change for high school education

·         Ontology-based Q/A is not a common place technology even for bio-informatics researcher

·         Education innovations usually begin at graduate level and trickle down to lower grade levels.

Challenge 2: Publishers are too daunted

They were asked if the method was generalizable to other domains. One biology book is too small.

 

Challenge 3: Further research

We do not have ontology designs for capturing all of textbook knowledge

·         For example, see our FOIS paper on content modeling challenges

·         We can currently model only 40-50% of textbook knowledge

·         We need sustained ontology research to capture greater fractions of textbook knowledge.

Challenge 4: Product-focused R&D

How much of the textbook do we actually need to capture?

·         What is the minimal viable representation?

·         How much of the representation can be incrementally added?

Should the answer be limited to just the chapter studied?

Challenge 5: Need non-profit driven funding

·         Academic research sources

·         Foundation and philanthropic support – people passionate about education and knowledge advancement

What do you need to commercialize a product:

A few paying customers – venture capital will take you more seriously

Minimum viable product (minimum freature you must have to make it useful) – eventually adapt to particular client requirements

Mara says: perhaps the challenge is the domain: schools only innovate to differentiate themselves from others (not being out-to-date). A difficult market to sell innovation.