Instead of digging into tonnes of websites scattered round the Internet, or wading through books at libraries, people will soon be able to access all kinds of knowledge just by clicking on a mouse, and the computer in front of them will serve up what they really need.

That's the vision of a group of technologists at the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec), who are trying to develop what they call knowledge engineering.

Knowledge engineering is developing, building and maintaining knowledge-based systems and technology, such as software engineering, artificial intelligence, databases, data mining, expert systems, decision-support systems, geographic information systems as well as natural-language processing. All are crucial to make the concept of knowledge engineering a reality.

Using knowledge-engineering technology, people would be able to get access to information easily and efficiently, said Nectec's deputy director Asanee Kawtrakul, who oversees the development of a knowledge-engineering technology roadmap.

With this new technology, people could search for information and get the result they really need, she said.

She added that as there is now a huge amount of information scattered in many places and it's very difficult for people to access the details they require, the idea is to apply technology to manage the unstructured information into newly structured data and allow people to access and use it more easily and efficiently.

"We now face an information pollution problem - we have a lot of information but we cannot use it effectively. We hope to use technology to turn the pollution into knowledge," she said.

As the development of knowledge-based systems is crucial for the country's development, especially with plans to move towards a new knowledge-based society, Nectec has a roadmap to develop knowledge engineering technology with the hope of creating a technology foundation to further develop knowledge-based systems for the country.

The roadmap is to set the direction for the development of knowledge-engineering technology for the next five years. Nectec has plans to develop the technology in three steps - short-, medium- and long-term plans.

The short-term plan is about the development of fundamental technology and basic research for knowledge engineering. This plan is set for two years. Asanee said in this period, the aim was to eventually develop a digital library where people could access and sort structured information easier and faster. The plan was to develop the necessary technology for content management, especially for both information collection and accessing. Text-processing technology such as optical character recognition, which converts scanned documents into text; speech processing technology to turn speech into text files; as well as image-processing technology; will play an important role in the data-collecting process. For easy access, technology to develop intelligent searches is also required.

She said the mid-term plan would cover the development of a better digital-library system and make the system able to automatically summarise. This phase will start in the third year.

In the long-term plan, the centre hopes to develop a knowledge-based system prototype that can allow people to search for any kind of knowledge through text, voice and images.

Technology development in this phase will also cover artificial intelligence to make the system's processing smarter, so that it can find, screen and present the results to match a user's need.

"Today, when people search for information on the Internet, they have to sort through all the information they get from the search results. It actually takes so much time until they get what they want. We hope to develop what we call a question answering system, which can answer people's questions. They just ask the system and it will them help them find the best result," she said.

In addition, the roadmap also puts the development of speech-to-speech translation technology in the pipeline. As the technology can translate speech from one language to another automatically, it can help people, even they talk different languages, to understand each other, and this will reduce language barriers in communication.

Nectec will use the roadmap as a guide for technology development in the area to help the country build a knowledge-based society.

Pongpen Sutharoj

The Nation