Category:Dino Karabeg's views on Knowledge Federation

At the University of Oslo, we have been working along two lines - methodology (Polyscopic Modeling or polyscopy) and application prototypes (Fuzzzy, Flexplearn, Key Point Dialog). As suggested by our TMRA 2007 poster, (see the photo or the PDF) and explained in the associated article draft, the methodology and the application prototypes may be imagined as two pillars in a strategy whose goal is to sustain innovative directions in knowledge federation and support its ascent to world-wide use and prominence.

In what follows I highlight the main elements in that strategy.

Our application prototypes help us understand the functionality, the uses and the possible impact of knowledge federation and polyscopy.

Fuzzzy is our experimental socio-semantic folksonomy, see Fuzzzy.com and our TMRA 2007 article Metadata creation in socio-semantic tagging systems: Towards holistic knowledge creation and interchange. Flexplearn is a university course model supporting flexible, exploratory learning, where students learn by co-creating or federating knowledge, see Section 3 in the Flexible and Exploratory Learning by Polyscopic Topic Maps article. The Key Point Dialog shows how knowledge federation may facilitate the solution to global issues and support grass-roots democracy, see How to begin the next renaissance – preliminary version. Polyscopia will extend the Flexplearn approach to academic communication, see Apres Bourdieu project sketch.

Our long-term focus is on developing a platform, tentatively called Polyscopia, for which the mentioned development projects will serve as prototypes.

My current main focus is on federating knowledge federation, by facilitating the communication within the community, and the co-development of the knowledge federation course, which will of course also be federated.

My current writing projects are in:

• Developing a draft of a methodological foundation for knowledge federation, by combining Polyscopic Modeling and HyperTopic.
• Drafting a requirements specification/design sketch for the Polyscopia platform, and producing a prototype implementation for the knowledge federation community.