EpiK Protocol: Building an Everlasting Knowledge Vault Broaden AI’s Horizons

Summary

The way of human knowledge inheritance has evolved from word of mouth to inscriptions, then bamboo slips, papers, before finally to the Internet today. However, traditional forms of human knowledge such as text, pictures and videos are difficult to be understood by machines; Google resolved this by introducing knowledge graph (KG) technology, laying the foundation for today’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) advancement.

The construction of a qualified KG that can be utilized by AI efficiently is met with multiple challenges: time-consuming to convert all knowledge to appropriate formats, massive labor required to perform tasks and also, the possibility of data manipulation under a centralized control system.

EpiK Protocol envisions building a decentralized KG using blockchain technology to expand the horizons of today’s AI technology, tapping on the decentralized storage technology which originated from Filecoin ,uniquely designed Token Economy which ensures fair incentives, Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO ) to ensure trusted governance, and Decentralized Financial Technology (DeFi ) for reliable financial capabilities. Thus, creating a trusted, multi-party collaboration platform where all trusted contributors are rewarded fairly.

The development of AI (as shown in Table 1) is divided into four major stages: computational intelligence, perceptual intelligence, cognitive intelligence and conscious intelligence.

· Computational intelligence allows machines to save and calculate data;
· Perceptual intelligence allows machines to listen and speak, to see and identify;
· Cognitive intelligence allows machines to understand and process information;
· Conscious intelligence allows machines to self-learn and remember.

EpiK Protocol envisions building a decentralized KG using blockchain technology with trustable storage, incentives, governance and financial capabilities; this creates a trusted, multi-party collaboration platform where all trusted contributors are rewarded fairly while preserving human knowledge at an affordable rate permanently, expanding the horizons of today’s AI, and will usher in the era of cognitive intelligence.

Trusted Finance

EpiK Protocol’s trusted financial capability is derived from Decentralized Financial Technology (DeFi). In the world of cryptocurrencies today, most users hold mainstream cryptos such as BTC/ETH. For these users to seamlessly participate in EpiK’s decentralized knowledge graph ecosystem, a decentralized lending service will be made available (see Figure 6) on EpiK Protocol.

Core Components

Structured on top of the underlying storages, EpiK Protocol’s core components are made up of Consensus Mechanism, Virtual Machine and Ledger On-Chain.

Consensus Mechanism mainly follows the Proof-of-Storage, Proof-of-Replication and Proof-of-Spacetime from Filecoin. However, EpiK Protocol chooses a unified 8M sector size (which is much smaller than Filecoin’s 32G sector size) to handle the large number of small files in the EpiK Protocol. This creates an opportunity for a large number of low-level node machines which are unable to participate in storage FIL in Filecoin Layer 1 Network, as they can now turn to storage in EpiK Protocol, maximizing the node storage capabilities.

In addition to being compatible with Filecoin’s Actor mechanism, EpiK Protocol is also compatible with the latest Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), thereby creating a linkway for smooth migration or integration of existing application resources in the Ethereum community, including DAO dApps (e.g., Aragon ）, Oracle services (e.g. Chainlink ), and DeFi dApps (e.g. Compound).

Smart Contract

Based on Filecoin’s Actor contract model, EpiK Protocol encodes on-chain incentive rules for each ecosystem participant (e.g., Domain Experts, Knowledge Node, Bounty Hunters, Voters and Knowledge Gateways).

Based on the EVM contract model, EpiK Protocol migrates the governance and financial services from the Ethereum ecosystem to the knowledge graph collaboration ecosystem.

During collaboration within EpiK Protocol, behaviors of each participant will be recorded in the event status. When a rule is triggered, it will be automatically enforced to reward or penalize the corresponding user accordingly, and the rule will meet consensus across the network quickly, locking the results, preventing any manipulation.

Open-source License

EpiK Protocol is an advocate of the open-source knowledge movement. Anyone can become a domain expert in accordance with the rules, contributing to the knowledge graph data and gaining benefits. Users of EpiK Protocol can also stake EPK accordingly to access knowledge graph data in different domains. These actions do not require any centralized authority’s permission.

EpiK Protocol believes that the open-source knowledge movement will once again profoundly improve the efficiency of collaboration between human and AI, AI and AI. Every domain expert has the right to define the open-source license in their domains. The license will be attached in the domain expert’s application information and stored in EpiK Protocol permanently.

Ecosystem Construction

The ecosystem of EpiK Protocol consists mainly of the Storage Group and Knowledge Group. In terms of storage, EpiK Protocol focuses on idle smaller capacity node machines whose performances are inadequate to participate in storage FIL (Filecoin’s native token). We collaborate with these mining partners to build EPK storage services, including node machine hosting, storage pools, cloud computing, cloud node machines and computing power tokens, etc., supplementing the Filecoin mining ecosystem.

In terms of knowledge, EpiK Protocol covers the whole process from the schema definition of knowledge graph data, to the extraction of knowledge graph data, and to the application of knowledge graph data. The knowledge graph data is predominantly demanded by experts from various domains of knowledge who have systematic knowledge structure, for example university professors with deep subject knowledge in the school, opinion leaders with rich information channels in the community, or talents, popular writers, etc. In addition to the community-voted Domain Experts, EpiK Protocol Foundation will regularly recruit Domain Experts to increase the diversity of the demand for knowledge graph, and to differentiate into more subdivisions.

The production of knowledge graph data will mainly be initiated by Domain Experts. EpiK Protocol will collaborate with various crowdsourcing platforms and professional annotation teams to help Domain Experts complete the distribution of manual tasks and cooperate with data annotation training institutions, expanding the number of Bounty Hunters available.

“EpiK” was derived from “Epigraphic Knowledge”, which means the deciphering of knowledge previously recorded on stele. At EpiK Protocol, we envision to build a global collaborative decentralized knowledge graph by applying four core trusted capabilities — trusted storage，trusted incentive， trusted governance and trusted finance, to organize the collaboration among global knowledge community users with an extremely low costs. Thus transferring human knowledge in various domains into an eternal knowledge graph, which broadens AI’s horizons and usher in the era of cognitive intelligence.