Knowledge Federation

Source

* Paper: Knowledge Federation as a Principle of Social Organization of Knowledge Creation and Sharing. Dino Karabeg and Roy Lachica.

URL = http://folk.uio.no/dino/ID/Articles/Karabeg-Lachica-KF08.pdf

Excerpts

"We explain knowledge federation by comparing it with two familiar principles of organization – conventional authoring of documents, and Wikipedia-style knowledge unification. We then discuss the advantages of our proposed strategy.

The conventional practice – authoring documents, without any systemic means for organizing the documents and the knowledge they contain into a coherent system, has the disadvantage of leaving the following Herculean tasks to the reader:

• Identifying and assembling the knowledge resources that are required for making a qualified judgment about a subject.

• Reconciling the divided or even incompatible opinions in order to arrive at an informed conclusion.

• Keeping the knowledge up to date and securing that it reflects the state of the art.

As the number of authored documents increases, these tasks tend to become impossible. To cope, the knowledge workers specialize and divide their domains, which leads to the problem described in Introduction.

An alternative is Wikipedia-style knowledge unification. In the Wikipedia, there is only one article associated with any subject. That article represents (an approximation of) the consensus position of the global community about its subject and reflects the current state of knowledge.

This principle of organization, however, also has disadvantages:

• The simple social process by which the consensus is reached (overwriting) obviously leaves room for improvement.

• It is difficult to secure that the authors receive credit for their work.

• It is difficult to show conflicting or contradictory points of view when those exist and need to exist.

Recognizing these limitations, Wikipedia disallows the publication of the results that have not already been published via conventional channels. But this means that the Wikipedia-style organization is suitable only for an encyclopedia, and not as an alternative to the conventional practice in the sciences and the media.

We define knowledge federation as the principle of organization that combines the advantages of the above two approaches and avoids their disadvantages (we italicize a concept when we attribute to it a local meaning, i.e. the one defined in this article). If we liken the conventional authored documents to independent states, and Wikipediastyle knowledge unification to everyone being coalesced into a single state, then knowledge federation may be likened to political federation, which aims to reconcile the demands for autonomy of the local units with the interests of the larger whole they compose together.

We let knowledge federation point at the broad spectrum of social organizations that are possible between the conventional document authoring and the Wikipediastyle knowledge unification as simple extreme points.

Knowledge federation is both a social organization of knowledge production, and an organization of knowledge resources.

Domain Map Object

We make initial progress towards a knowledge federation system design by identifying its three large building blocks. We begin with the domain map object.

The main purpose of the Domain Map Object is, intuitively, to provide a ‘map’ for placing and locating knowledge resources.

A reader familiar with Topic Maps will need no introduction to the usefulness of such maps. Like a topic map, the Domain Map will allow for a subject-centric organization of knowledge resources, where each subject points at all the resources that are about that subject. To properly make an article or any other knowledge resource known and accessible, its author will not only publish it, but also ‘place it on the map.’

A significant difference between a topic map and a domain map is that the former is only a topical index into a domain, while the latter represents a domain. In this regard a domain map is more similar to a geographical map. A domain map should not only map the existing knowledge, but also orient research, by showing the areas where knowledge is still lacking.

To that end, the Domain Map Object will provide functions for co-creating abstract views of a domain.

Multiple views of a domain will be provided (analogous to geophysical, political, climatological and other maps in geography).

The representation of domain maps invites creative use of visual techniques."