Boundary Object

Boundary Object = An object that can attract shared understanding and engagement from different communities.

Definition

"Artifacts, Documents and perhaps even vocabulary that can help people from different communities build a shared understanding. Boundary objects will be interpreted differently by the different communinities, and it is an acknowledgement and discussion of these differences that enables a shared understanding to be formed." (from the enTWIne project http://webguide.cs.colorado.edu:9080/entwine/Concepts/Concept210/viewDesc)

Key Book to Read

Peter Morville. Ambient Findability. O'Reilly, 2005

quote: "As we build our Internet of objects, the permutations of sociosemantic metadata will create new avenues of findability. Where has this object been? Which objects were in close proximity to this object? Who touched my object? Where are they now? The era of ambient findability will overflow with metadata, as every object and location sprouts tags: social and semantic, embedded and unembedded, controlled and uncontrollable. Imagine the sensory overload of a walk in the park. Every path shimmers with the flow of humanity. Every person drips with the scent of information: experience, opinion, karma, contacts. Every tree has a story: taxonomies and ontologies form bright lattices of logic. Desire lines flicker with unthinkable complexity in this consensual hallucination of space and non-space, a delicious yet overwhelming sociosemantic experience."