Mapping the accomplishments of the past and the possibilities of the future

At the beginning of the 20th century, explorers, scientists, oceanographers, aviators, and other adventurous spirits—often aided by the emerging technologies of the time—set out to explore the planet’s remaining frontiers and expand the boundaries of human experience and knowledge.

A century later, information technology has created a new frontier where all the accomplishments of the past and all the possibilities of the future wait for intrepid explorers to blaze trails of discovery. So the building of the Knowledge Web is not so much a project as it is an expedition, and like any great expedition, it needs hands, minds, skills, and work.

Here’s how it works

The Knowledge Web presents knowledge in a highly interconnected, holistic way that makes it possible to follow an almost infinite number of paths of exploration among people, places, things, and events.

Each such person, place, thing, or event is represented by a node in a web of connections. Selecting a node brings up in-depth information, a "vital statistics" summary, and links to multimedia or other web sites.

From each node, users can travel to other nodes that are connected via historical relationships. The Knowledge Web also allows users to "zoom out" and see the constellation of other nodes that relate to any given starting point. Users are never lost because they are oriented in space by maps, in time by a timeline, and in their own journey by an archived list of all the nodes they’ve visited. They can even save maps of their journeys and e-mail them to other explorers. The map and timeline can also be used as input with other filtering devices, so users can find, for instance, French 17th-century chemists who were self-educated.

The possible pathways are infinite. The first iteration of the Knowledge Web will contain nearly 2,000 nodes connected in tens of thousands of ways.

Video demo