Interoperability of Knowledge

Discussion

By John Wilbanks and Carolina Rossini:

There is a key lesson for educational institutions aiming for distributed knowledge creation to draw from the technical world: the idea of interoperability. Interoperability allows unrelated systems to communicate and function in ways unexpected by their designers. The idea of interoperability as something that scales from technology to knowledge itself has emerged alongside the rise of the digital commons in culture and software. In this view, it is not only computer networks that must interoperate, but intellectual property rights and semantic understanding, so that distributed peer production of knowledge can make the leap from an encyclopedia into the sciences and other research disciplines." (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/commonsbasedresearch/sites/commonsbasedresearch/images/Genomics_Knowledge_Governance.pdf)