GNOWSYS prototype building began in 2001 with the first release (0.2) in 2002. The current release version is 0.6 at the time of writing this document. The current development version is 0.7 slowly progressing for the first stable version 0.8. The code is contributed by several programmers[34].
Several modules are actively developed and it is deployed to build a community portal gnowledge.org[35], which will serve a large multi-lingual corpus of concepts of science and folk-lore in various languages with a facility to weave true propositions. It is an official GNU project, and so I hope like many other GNU projects it will continue to exist and maintained with support from developers across the globe[36].
GNOWSYS is deployed as a dynamic web server of Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education[37]. Recently an English thesaurus was built using the entire database of Wordnet (an English thesaurus developed by Princeton University), containing around 100,000 objects and 300,000 semantic relations among them[33]. This instance is a good demonstration of the potential of GNOWSYS as a knowledge base. A prototype of active procedural objects showcasing web service model of GNOWSYS was also developed[32].
The objective of GNOWSYS as a knowledge base is very near completion, but as modeling tool for process modeling and cognitive development still remains a concept on paper. This cannot be done without introducing the time dimension in the system. A proper scheme for authoring temporal knowledge, and to build systems that are process driven is being worked out based on pi-calculus and Petri Nets[38,21]. It is interesting to note that a flexible modeling scheme based on communication between artificial and human agents necessitates the need for process driven architectures on one hand and analogy driven architectures on the other[39]. In this context John Sowa's remarks on dealing with ``knowledge soup'' are relevant and provide both perspective and guidelines to the current challenges[40].