-
-
WebSummit Demo 2022
-
EFM / UBOS at WebSummit
-
-
Inspiration
Our motto is: As Above, So Below; As Within, So Without. Wisdom is our inspiration.
Hermetic Wisdom is all inclusive; Hermeticism stretches back to Humanity's earliest thinkers, prophets, mages. The Embassy of the Free Mind has an archive of 30,000 books and documents which are linked to all human knowledge of all eras - from Hermeticism to Kabbalah, from Alchemy to Demonology, from Sufism to Buddhism.
The EFM is now a participating member of UNESCO's Memory of the World program. We seek to invite additional museums and specializing libraries to upload their collections.
What it does
We are working together with the EFM to provide researchers and enthusiasts a novel approach to explore knowledge using modern technologies. Researchers can access the base documents and texts (OCR, documents), within a social community that is organized around content. Researchers are empowered by having access to advanced information processing tools from multiple domains: Geospatial analysis, temporal analysis, NLP processing, Semantics, and advanced retrieval and curation.
A researcher can explore and discuss wisdom and meaning, and perceive how Above, Below, Within, Without are inter-connected in space, time, topic and causality.
How we built it
Our team is distributed; We work from Ukraine, Netherlands, Canada and Argentina. We bring a mix of competencies, ranging from industry domain knowledge (museum), ontology, AI, information retrieval and analysis, data visualization, product design, low-code software development and algorithms.
The product is an evolution of an internal hackathon meant to test the limits of UBOS platform. UBOS is a low code platform which enables developers to rapidly conjure applications using a low-code approach.
The platform is hosted on AWS; We received sufficient credits to be hosted for the next few years.
Challenges we ran into
As part of the dev team is located mostly in Ukraine, the main challenge we ran into is interrupted development, especially in the past few weeks, as the constant bombing of Ukraine disrupted power and network. As without, So within, as applied to software development projects.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
UBOS was chosen to represent Ukraine Alpha startups in WebSummit last week, and the EFM platform was demonstrated. The First Lady of Ukraine, Olana Zelensky, and the minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, attended, provided strong positive feedback, and made everyone very proud and happy.
What we learned
- We learned that it is difficult to explain in words how everything is connected, but, it is quite easy to show the interconnectedness of a domain and the connectedness of knowledge domains using a dashboard.
- We learned that libraries and museums are yearning for innovation, and are surprisingly eager to adopt solutions they like.
- We learned the limits of tech: we can do the most sophisticated tech magic, but we cannot remove the human. For example, Mercury could be a planet, a metal, (and a singer), and no euclidian distance or cosine similarity will resolve this ambiguity without human intervention.
- With goodwill and commitment, people can come together and create something that may inspire and empower millions of people for years. We are not small, powerless individuals - we are strongest when we join forces out of personal passions.
What's next for The Embassy of The Free Mind Community Platform
Following stabilization of the current phase, we seek to provide libraries with a way to register, upload their archives, and invite the scholars, students and enthusiasts who are interested in their collections. We seek to create an equitable approach, where all stakeholders of the ecosystem feel empowered and rewarded, sharing the same mission statement: Extending human knowledge, and making it available and affordable to every human on the planet.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.