Epiture Architecture & Technology

  Epiture is an entirely new way to manage and access Internet-based knowledge and content (where content can mean anything from text to multimedia to applications). Although Internet-based, instead of the web page, the fundamental operating units in Epiture are topics and content objects. Individual objects in these two classes can be related to one another as desired, and by degree. The result is a rich network of content -- in fact it is a "fuzzy" network -- that is, topics and content can be partially related to one another. This is the fuzzy set paradigm, as opposed to the hierarchical paradigm, on which today’s Web implicitly rests.

  The fuzzy content network paradigm has some big advantages. First and foremost, it reflects the way the human mind actually processes information, and therefore provides more intuitive navigation. It also allows a much more graceful scaling than do classic hierarchies -- vast knowledge bases can be effectively managed and navigated using Epiture.

  Epiture enables content experts and ordinary knowledge workers, without any IT expertise whatsoever, to assemble an integrated network of topics and associated content. The network, including the relationships among topic and content, and meta-information about the content items, essentially constitute a semantic network with regard to the particular domain. This content network then dynamically generates an Internet environment. In fact, the network can dynamically create an unlimited number of customized environments. This feature alone has the potential to revolutionize knowledge-based CRM. But even better, a business using Epiture can enable its clients to publish their own content into an Epiture environment, and then cascade the resulting network to their clients, and so on. This unlimited cascading essentially replaces the existing environment paradigm with a semantic level syndication model. In fact, a P2P engine can be added to allow distributed Epiture knowledge bases to share topics and associated content networks dynamically. ManyWorlds’ view is that it is inevitable that the Internet evolves in this direction, and we see Epiture being well ahead of any alternative.

  Epiture was also architected from the beginning to be adaptive -- the content network can dynamically adapt to the traffic patterns of the community of users, or an individual user, for example. In other words, the basic architecture supports an interactive interface that actually learns.

  In summary, Epiture is really all about creating a new level of abstraction on the Internet. It has potential to be a fundamental capability on which other applications rest.