UF Prospectus 1 Introduction

Douglas Engelbart’s lifelong and lonely quest for a way to augment our collective ability to act intelligently [REF] has in recent years given way to a whole movement. Tools for global sense making are reaching maturity and promising to change the way debates and dialogues are being made. The Topic Maps and the Semantic Web are transforming information organization. There are already a number of groups and communities making excellent progress on collaborative creation and organization of knowledge. So why create another one? What might knowledge federation provide that is not already there? The Knowledge Federation initiative has been motivated by an intuition that there is a missing piece in this development which, when replaced, may significantly augment the prospects of the existing initiatives through its synergies. A purpose of this article is to give a voice to this intuition. ‘Knowledge federation’ is the name we have given to this missing piece, as well as for the project we have initiated for its practical development and deployment.

This article will represent our shared understanding of knowledge federation as it is at this moment, and outline how the knowledge federation project will continue to evolve in the near future. October 20-22, 2008, the First International Conference on Knowledge Federation was organized in Dubrovnik, Croatia, with the goal to consolidate this initiative. The last day of this conference was dedicated to putting together everyone’s ideas about knowledge federation, with the purpose of defining a clear profile and agenda for the future. The questions that motivated us were pragmatic and central for our undertaking: Is knowledge federation really an academic field on its own right? Are we just giving another name to a subject that has already become ‘hot’? What is the difference between knowledge federation and other similar initiatives such as the Semantic Web and the Global Sensemaking? The present article is on one side a record of the results of this dialogue, and on the other side its extension, since our reflection and conversation continued during the time between the conference and the publication of this proceedings.

Instead of providing a definition that would say what ‘knowledge federation’ really is, we undertake to federate an answer. A reason is that want to allow each of us and everyone else to attribute to ‘knowledge federation’ a somewhat different meaning, to reflects personal preferences and inclinations. We also want to allow the meaning of ‘knowledge federation’ to change with time, as our understanding progresses.

A purpose of this article is to reach out to the wider audience with our ideas. To build bridges, the article will be non-technical.

The remainder of this article is organized as follows. In the second section we mention some concerns that motivate the Knowledge federation initiative. In the third, we outline the underlying principles. In the fourth, we describe knowledge federation in terms of its main aspects. In the fifth, we show how this shared idea is reflected in our individual approaches and positions. In the sixth, we outline how we intend to develop the Knowledge Federation initiative further. In the concluding section, we discuss knowledge federation as a methodology for socio-technical system design.

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