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The issues that motivate knowledge federation have well recognized.
Cognitive overload and knowledge organization
The more knowledge we have about a subject, the less we seem able to assemble and digest the relevant pieces and form an opinion. When the nature of our subject is such that we need to agree on a suitable course of action, as in the case of contemporary global challenges, then this ‘cognitive overload’ may be something that we cannot afford to tolerate.
This has of course been recognized [REF], and technologies have already been developed for solution. The Topic Maps have been developed for subject-centric document organization, and the RDF/OWL for semantic annotation and automated search. However, the adoption of these technologies has been reported as slow, and in some of the largest and strategically central sectors of knowledge creation and sharing, notably in academic research and education, they have not yet been integrated into common practice.
Seeking for the significant obstacle to a substantial change of practice, we find it in that practice. The numerous steps that constitute our basic processes of article publishing, coursework and promotion have evolved through hundreds of years, based on the printed text and the lecture hall as media. Changing those steps and arriving at a completely different system, that would dramatically reduce the cognitive overload by employing the new technology, is well beyond the power of any single researcher.
The knowledge federation undertakes to overcome this obstacle in the following two ways:
- By developing a suitable constellation of researchers that can complete the above design task.
- By developing a complete functioning instance of a different practice.
Adoption of technology
A closely related issue is the one of the adoption of technology. Here we may consider the Semantic Web and the Topic Maps technologies as instances of a much larger issue—the existing technology offers possibilities for radical improvement of core information-related practices such as informing and education, but the practice is slow to adjust and take advantage of what is offered. The example of the computer gaming industry shows that education and ‘official culture’ have not always been well positioned to use the advancing technology to their advantage.
If, however, those core practices could be significantly altered, this could result in significantly higher adoption rates of technology, with corresponding advantages for the IT industry and research.
By developing the knowledge federation research and practice, we intend to give an impetus to such development.
An emerging paradigm
The Wikipedia project has shown that a community of people, and even the global community, can co-create a consensus version of a document. This possibility points at an emerging paradigm in knowledge creation and use, alternative to text authoring which has dominated recorded communication since the beginning of civilization. Not only our conventional routines of publishing and promotion, but also our thinking about information sharing and the very language we use to talk about it reflects the old paradigm.
Wikipedia has re-defined the way an encyclopedia can be created, by substituting the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ for the knowledge of an expert. This has obvious advantages – Wikipedia (at least in theory) represents the current state of knowledge of the global community, rather than of a given expert at a given time. Wikipedia, however, also has disadvantages – for accountability, authenticity and academic and other credit, it may be preferable to allow an expert to author a text and not have it modified by the ‘wise crowds.’ This is, of course, a lot more prominent concern in the case of newly published research, and Wikipedia has no pretentions to be a suitable medium in that domain as well.
In knowledge federation we undertake to explore and develop the vast space of possibilities between those two extremes – conventional authoring of articles, and creating a single ‘mass-produced’ document that only points at some of its authored sources. As we shall see, the synergy between the local and the global, or the authored and the shared, is what the whole 'federation' approach is about.
Responding to global challenges
It is now well recognized that our technically advanced civilization may be on a hazardous course.
To facilitate collaborative issue mapping and problem solving a number of sense making technologies have been developed (REFS). Recently those technologies have been deployed for participatory media issue mapping in collaboration with the CNN Christiane Amanpour news program (REF).
Observing that any tool for collective thinking, however excellent, bears the risk of re-inforcing a certain way of thinking and precluding the emergence of potentially remedial new ones, knowledge federation undertakes to
Our favored strategy for approaching the global challenges is by facilitating the cultural evolution - creating the technical tools and ways of social interaction that facilitate bringing ides or memes together so that they can cross-fertilize and produce new ides and new qualities.
Or to use Dag Engelbart's language, we focus on C-level activities (a suitable organization for developing developing new forms of organization).
Augmenting the collective intelligence
If we look at the current organization of knowledge production and sharing, we immediately realize large possibilities of improvement. We focus on augmenting the structure and the inter-connectivity of the 'global brain' and on the intentionality of its 'cells.'
Truth and power
The question what we as society believe in, how our wrldview is created, is of central importance. We looked up to the Bible, and later in the 'scientific method' to give us the truth about reality, but the post-modernity questions such authorities.
Yet we need shared truth in order to orient our daily lives and coordinate the handling of contemporary challenges.
We submit that federating the truth and reality pictres may be a functional yet democratic replacement for traditional authoritarian reality pictures.
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