BISON

FET Open
Humans are gifted at uncovering hidden similarities between concepts, even illogical ones. Computers aren’t… yet. Thus uniquely human gift is the basis of our creativity and humour.
The concept of association is at the heart of many of today’s powerful ICT technologies such as information retrieval and data mining. These technologies typically employ “association by similarity or co-occurrence” to discover new information relevant to the evidence already known to the user. However, domains that are characterized by the need to develop innovative solutions require a form of creative information discovery from increasingly complex, heterogeneous and geographically distributed information sources. These domains, including design and engineering (drugs, materials, processes, devices), areas involving art (fashion and entertainment), and scientific discovery disciplines, require a different ICT paradigm that can help users to uncover, select, re-shuffle, and combine diverse contents to synthesize new features and properties leading to creative solutions. People working in these areas employ creative thinking to connect seemingly unrelated information, for example, by using metaphors or analogical reasoning. These modes of thinking allow the mixing of conceptual categories and contexts, which are normally separated. The functional basis for these modes is a mechanism called bisociation (see Arthur Koestler “The Act of Creation”).The goal of the BISON project is to develop a fundamentally new ICT paradigm based on the concept of bisociation. The key vision of the BISON project is to develop a bisociative information discovery framework and an implemented open-source BISON platform for interactive and scalable processing of massive, dispersed collections of heterogeneous contents. The BISON project will develop a novel knowledge representation formalism (a bisociation network) and a bisociative reasoning mechanism enabling information discovery from the resulting network, using novel graph analysis, visualization and explanation techniques. The developed BISON technology will be tested in four scenarios to validate the new paradigm.