The WebKB set of tools

Aims of these tools. This set of tool aims to ease
1) the cooperative construction of knowledge bases by multiple users,
2) the use of knowledge representations for indexing or connecting WWW-accessible document elements (e.g. sentence, images and whole documents), and
3) the retrieval of this knowledge or the document elements it index.
See this extended abstract or this article for more information.
Only one knowledge representation language is currently proposed and exploited by the below set of tools: the Conceptual Graph formalism.
However, the used architecture allows easy extensions. Please contact us (pm .@. phmartin dot info) if you want to provide other knowledge browser/editor/retrieval tools to be accessible from here. We are also interested in your comments on these tools, their interface, and the uses you make of them.
These tools are free software for research purpose only (cf. copyright).

Warning. Most of these tools use Javascript so that you can easily adapt their layout or their behaviour. Javascript also presently seems safer than Java and is quicker to load.
However, Javascript is presently only implemented on the browsers Netscape and Internet explorer. Hence, to use the above tools, you have to use one of these browsers and the use of Javascript must be allowed (cf. the "Network Preference" - "Languages" menu).
Besides, Javascript is still a new language and the implementation of some features differs from browser to browser. This should not be a problem for the above tools except for the hierarchy browsers : they work with Netscape 2.0 and 3-01 on IRIX but have led to different kinds of errors on other platforms. Hence, if you encounter Javascript errors during the loading of one the above tools, please use another browser for using this tool. Otherwise, mild problems may often be solved by reloading the tool (use the "Reload" button or the "View - Reload" menu).
Please also note that Netscape does not pop up a window (for a tool) if this window already exists. Finally, sometimes Netscape do not open windows any more. In that case you have to exit Netscape and start it again.

Knowledge repositories are presently WWW-accessible documents. The implementation of a WWW-accessible&updatable database should normally begin by May 1998.