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What is HORUS ?

HORUS (SourceForge project name AI-HORUS) is a system for knowledge acquisition, hypothesis generation, inference and learning. It is designed to be a highly interactive, multi-user, internet-based environment that will be accessible to a diverse community of users (public-access or membership basis) for search, comparison, and evaluation of many media types. Users will collaboratively build and develop the content of the knowledge bases therein, creating resources that can be employed by both human users and "artificially intelligent" agents for conducting expert-level searches, evaluations, comparisons, data mining, content extraction and summarization on a variety of media. Such media will include documents, articles and other text-based objects but also non-text media as well including images, audio and video. An important and in fact the central component of HORUS is a complex structure of functions and databases known as the Syntopicon which has aspects of its data structure and functionality in common with semantic networks, topic maps, dictionaries, thesauruses, and encyclopedias but which is quite novel in its approach to accumulating information from users and external automatic-access sources and in its mechanisms of both storing and operating upon the information collected or generated internally.

HORUS is adaptable to many different application areas and is not limited to one domain. The knowledge bases under construction presently (5/2003) are general-purpose in nature and can be trimmed or pruned to fit the needs of more specialized audiences of users and developers. HORUS is not in itself a content management system (CMS) or collaborative workspace. The software is being designed to enable system designers to incorporate it either by access to a public server (the central and open-to-all version) or by direct access at the source level into their engines and systems. In fact HORUS is being targeted for integration with the Tiki System and another (Planeta-Zonus) that is not in the SourceForge world. There are additionally several potential testbeds for the system's use, in both commercial and non-profit areas, including education, collaborative distance-based learning, disease management and financial planning.

The fundamental architecture is based upon the concept of elemental objects that denote either abstract or specific concrete referants in the world of the user's knowledge and interests. These range from basic concepts and themas to actual documents, images, video, URLs, and a total of twenty such categories. Elements are defined, associated, or otherwise related with one another in a very open and flexible manner that allows for "partial" or "fuzzy" completion of definitions, associations, and inferences involving different elemental objects. In the context of Wiki/Tiki technologies a community of users can share (according to different privilege and permission schemas) the creation and editing of objects in the HORUS universe. Different types of objects including media such as memos, quotes, articles, and images can be employed both as components of the relational definition-association-inference building process and also as material to be processed by HORUS using the knowledge that it has acquired and accumulated.

The software that is now being implemented is an early stage version that is principally using PHP, some Perl and Python, and MySQL. There are functions that will be coded in Python first and later Java and most likely only Java, Python, PHP and Perl will be used. All programming is and will be server-side, the client requirements being a standard browser with few requirements (e.g., cookies enabled, but there will be adaptations later for non-cookie machines). All server work is being done on Linux but there are plans to accommodate Windows platforms as well when there is sufficient time and also people on the team to do so.

While MySQL is used as the standard RDBMS, there are plans to develop code for Oracle databases as well. The use of relational databases will change over time. Presently all information is stored within database tables and only in such format. This is for early developmental stages only.

A unique feature of HORUS that will improve its performance and its automated reasoning and recognition capabilities is an algorithm under development that will periodically transform certain database structures into compact numerical codes that can be more rapidly accessed and also maintained in non-disk environments. The GUI is principally a network of forms and popups that provide additional data often in the form of automatic and dynamic lists of related concepts and documents, links, suggestions, alternatives, and selected foreign language terms. HORUS manages dynamic content in different windows as well as dynamic traversal of paths within the "dialogue space" of building definitions, performing searches and comparisons, and exploring for similar objects and types.

The architecture underlying HORUS and many of the core algorithms are the result of research and development during a span of over twenty years by the principal designer, Martin Dudziak. Much of the logic and many of the algorithms have roots in a variety of "AI" and pattern recognition methodologies including rule-based inferencing, neural networks, Bayesian probabilistic reasoning and fuzzy logic. Now as an Open Source project with a home at SourceForge it is intended that additional developers will join into the project and assist in its implementation with both programming and content creation, as well as in its dissemination into the worldwide community when it reaches a sufficiently mature state.

Intended requirements (R) and recommendations on the server side are presently: Apache, PHP 4.1+ (R), MySql 3.2+ (R), 8MB PHP script memory allocation and the ability to set PHP to write into a variety of user-controlled directories. There are no special graphics features at present nor any extraordinary demands upon system CPU or memory resources.

Some Relevant Documents

These are historical pieces and NOT formal elements of the HORUS system design! They may help to understand some of the thought processes, they may give some inspiration, probably confusion, but they are here anyhow:

Contact Information

Project Administrator: Martin Dudziak

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