Vision of the Knowledge Network
Our basic goal is to develop an Intermental Knowledge Network (IKN) where the minds 
of collaborating individuals are linked between themselves and to distributed electronic 
information resources. This IKN will use a variety of ingenious sensors and actuators to 
enhance the rendering and expression of information to and from the collaborating minds. 
This will enable minds universal access to the IKN independent of most physical 
disabilities. In our Knowledge Network, computers play three distinct roles. Firstly there 
is the powerful but rather conventional role as Web and other servers dispensing and 
creating knowledge on demand -- they create an electronic information world with 
universal access in which fertile medium our IKN is built. Our IKN will specialize in 
bootstrap fashion on the study of information aimed at building IKN's of our type. 
Secondly computers serve the human minds in linking them to this world -- here we use 
our NeatTools software to rapidly prototype and optimize the universal access for 
particular individuals. Thirdly our IKN will enable more than the traditional incoherent 
asynchronous interactions of minds with web based information systems. Conventionally 
each client (human mind) links essentially independently to a single (web) server in a 
given transaction. The IKN’s Wisdom is obtained by the incoherent but interacting sum 
of individual contributions. As in a parallel computer, our proposed IKN will as 
necessary enhance this asynchronous activity with the coherent and synchronous linkage 
of minds together to tackle a single problem. This coherent linkage is achieved by 
developing our collaborative system TangoInteractive to support universal access. 
Already TangoInteractive supports both synchronous and asynchronous activities but this 
feature will be further extended in this proposal. Note that our concept is a major 
extension of the interesting and still developing shared immersive virtual environments. 
In the latter, one represents the world classically by the actions of other people on it. In 
contrast, an IKN directly represents other participants through a rendering of their 
perceptual state. Similarly an Intermental Knowledge Network reverses the traditional 
role of the human and computers. Rather than the human as the usually asynchronous 
viewer of the computer's possibly parallel computations, we consider the digital computer 
network as fertile medium supporting the really powerful computer corresponding to the 
synchronous interactive IKN of linked minds. Note how designing our universal access 
knowledge network has naturally led to the novel concept of an Intermental network 
which can be used in essentially all Knowledge Networks -- whether or not they feature 
the use or study of universal access.

IKN Technology Summary
	There are three major distinctive technologies needed to implement our IKN. 
Firstly there are the sensors and hardware interfaces needed to implement the linkage of 
individual minds to the IKN with universal access. Secondly there is the software system 
NeatTools which implements a powerful rapid prototyping dataflow paradigm to 
integrate the hardware components into complete client systems. Finally we form the 
coherent synchronous IKN using the Tango Interactive collaboratory which formally 
supports the sharing of distributed objects which are either the linked minds or 
information "nuggets" from underlying web.

TangoInteractive for the Universal Access IKN
	Currently TangoInteractive, like the pioneering Habanero system on which it was 
based, supports the powerful event sharing model for replicated objects which appears to 
most appropriate for any KN supporting synchronous  object sharing. In this proposal, we 
extend Tango in two critical fashions. Tango is built around core client and server 
infrastructure, which is exposed to the user as a "control application". This graphical user 
interface allows overall control of and access to the linked users and applications. This 
information naturally must be universally accessible to all the minds involved in an IKN 
synchronous session. We will extend our current Java GUI to support universal access 
and believe this will be quite straightforward as this applet has rather limited and well 
defined scope. Universal access to other shared objects will be handled differently and 
will exploit Tango's ability to support the linkage of different views of a given object. 
Any object can be automatically mapped through filters embedded in Tango's core 
infrastructure and so customized separately for each client. We will design a suite of 
filters that will supply access to chosen classes of users. Note that support of different 
views is already implemented in Tango but for cases where clients have different roles 
(such as teacher and student) rather than different interface requirements. Note that 
support of different views requires cooperation between server and client. For instance a 
blind user would download an audio enriched version of the object while the deaf client 
would download the image rich version. On the client side, we would use NeatTools to 
interface the chosen object views with the available sensors. Note that we will develop 
some filters such as sonification for general HTML pages, which will be useable on a 
broad class of objects. Other filters will be specialized to particular objects such as a 
shared Java educational applet illustrating a physical simulation.
	Any KN will need both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration and Tango 
Interactive's capabilities will be extended in this respect as part of ongoing activities 
outside this proposal. Already Tango supports several versions of a shared Web browser 
and we are adding a database backend for recording synchronous sessions for later 
playback. We are also linking Tango with Lotus Notes so as to be able to exploit its well 
known workflow and asynchronous tools such as calendars and threaded discussion lists. 
Other relevant Tango extensions include support of a classic multi-room paradigm with 
possible persistent applications and users and appropriate security.