The line of research of the WebKB project is to permit and help the represention or structuration of any kind (and amount) of information in a formal or semi-formal way, manually or semi-automatically, and then its retrieval and comparison.
- The necessary resources for manual information retrieval and comparison (i.e. the notations, conventions, methodology, ontology and knowledge server) have been designed and seems to be at the "pilot stage". Many small examples have been built (http://www.webkb.org/kb/) and a particular application ("locating and comparing accomodations on the Sunshine Coast") is in development (http://www.webkb.org/SC/).
- The tools for semi-automatic knowledge representation are at the "idea stage".
- The tools for exporting knowledge to other formats, or importing from other formats, are at the "exploration stage" (e.g. see http://www.webkb.org/interface/categSearch.html and http://www.webkb.org/kb/ontolingua/). However, it seems much more important to develop applications and semi-automatic knowledge representation tools than to pursue the development of knowledge importing/exporting tools.