Sharing, finding, evaluating and improving previous research achievements are the common tasks of a researcher. Therefore federation of research should be no challenge at all, one would expect that this issue is solved a long time ago, since the first sophisticated digital archives and collaborative tools were available. But unfortunately (based on my own experiences) the only tools which we are really using are: • e-mail for communication (maybe skype if you are lucky) • the deadly MS Word/Excel double (again if your are “lucky” MS Access) for knowledge production • Google for finding “things” on the Internet (maybe some tagging) • Wikipedia or some HTML / news groups for information • digital inflexible catalogs of the local libraries • Pen & Paper Did I forget something? Maybe, but you must at least acknowledge that these are the common tools which dominate the knowledge production in universities but also in R&D departments of big companies. I have seen gigantic excel tables to handle and improve the error management of an upper-class car producer - ridicules and they still think this is a good and new idea. After approx. 15 years of Internet and after web 2.0, web 3.0 still no significant improvement in the way we create, share knowledge. We have all these wonderful technical opportunity but we are not using them.

The research domain is especially caught in there doxa (old traditions) of publishing paper, reviews and then put the Processings/Journals in a dusty shelf (most time without the right to publish it somewhere else). This is a long and frustrating progress. A good example is the processings of the last TMRA 07 - it took Springer about 10 month to publish the book. To have the arrogance to keep good and needed research achievements so long hidden is really shocking.

Therefore federation of knowledge, where sharing, finding, evaluating of research results is the main objective and not publishing, is the really challenge. Not only to find suitable tools to support this task but even more important is the change of the thinking of the researches - to change their priorities.

Knowledge federation can be a starting point for such a development - enlarging the individual views and to foster the insight that a holistic solution is needed. If research accept this situation there are much more willing to change there knowledge production and especially the knowledge distribution. Knowledge federation as a community must be a acting as a good example and provide guidance to foster the change.

• A very nice example for a digital library is the Digital Mechanism and Gear Library (DMG-Lib).
  This library does not only provides (FREE) the images of books but also the full text and other enrichments of the content. What we can learn form this project is, that a simple digital copy is not enough. You need to enrich the content with other digital informations in order to provide the user with an additional value - all to motivate him to read the information online, e.g. the animated some gear models.

We have digital libraries open archives, open access and sophisticated copy rights (GPL) to protect the rights of the creators. We should use them properly for a federated knowledge distribution, e.g.

to be continued ...

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