Profiling Knowledge Federation PART I: Design

[Dino Karabeg]

Profiling Knowledge Federation PART I: Design

The task of profiling Knowledge Federation may be defined by the following questions:

 What is knowledge federation? 

 Is knowledge federation really a new research area? 

 Do we need a knowledge federation community and what will this community be doing? 

 Why not join an existing community, such as the Semantic Web, or the Global Sensemaking? 

 Are we not creating a small silo?

When taking up this task, our first challenge is to federate an answer. Knowledge federation must provide room for everyone’s definition and contribution. And at the same time, because we need a profile and a clear direction, it must provide a shared definition.

In what follows I would like to offer a contribution to our profiling dialog from the point of view of the main message of the book  draft “Information Must be Designed” that I have just finished writing.

The message of this book, the meme I have endeavored to spread by writing it, and the cause to which I would like to dedicate much of my time in the future (conveniently presented to you here as a bumper sticker :-)) is that information must be designed. The idea is simple: For a night ride in a bus to be ‘sustainable,’ the headlights of the bus must be designed, not just simply inherited from the past. Similarly, the practice of designing what we do with information, instead of automatically relying on our traditional routines, is a necessary condition for arriving at a sustainable condition, says the book. 

Perhaps everyone in this community will agree with this basic message. Aren’t we all committed in our work to finding better ways of creating and communicating knowledge? Several of us are even specifically focused on ‘wicked problems.’ There is, however, a catch.

When we commit our articles to conference proceedings and journals (and even when we write a book saying ‘information must be designed) and then move on to our next writing project, aren’t we implicitly assuming that there is a coherent, well-functioning system out there that will make a good use of our insights and put them into practice? 

In other words, are we not committing some of that ‘candles error’?

When we create tools for dialoging and co-creating knowledge, and when we make them available on the Web and report about them in a professional article, it is far from granted that those tools will end up being used by the people who might benefit from them anywhere soon, that the article we have written will be read by them, or that it will in any way influence their practice. We are here dealing with the symptoms of the very problem are trying to solve! 

Here is an example that illustrates my point.  In the Socio-semantic Web and Knowledge Federation course that I am teaching these days I recommended the http://esw.w3.org/topic/SemanticWebTools  website as a good source of Semantic Web tools. This website is also a good example of the point I am trying to make. One would think that the people who created the tools website would use some of their tools to present their tools in a coherent way and relate them to one another. But they don’t! The tools are simply divided into sections and listed alphabetically.

If even the people who are creating the Semantic Web tools are not really using them, then how can we expect anyone else will?

I do not mean to be sarcastic or critical, but to point out that the task of changing our habitual patterns of communication is not as easy as just offering new technology, or as simple as breaking a habit. Communication is like the nervous system in the cultural organism, it is woven into all its tissues. Everything else depends on it, and it depends on everything else. 

And yet it is this communication practice that we now need to change. 

So let us change it!

I am proposing that we consider it as one of our key challenges to design functioning, practical instances of knowledge federation. And that we design everything that may be needed for a change of practice. 

The emphasis of design is on creating a functioning whole. A car needs to have all its main parts in place before it can be driven. A way of creating and disseminating knowledge needs more than just technology to be usable. 

It is beyond anyone’s ability to do such design alone. And yet it is no less than that that is needed before one can put the tools we are creating into practice. 

A combination of backgrounds and skills is needed. Let us create a knowledge federation design project that will bring together the necessary experts and expertise and organize suitable exchange and federation.

You may imagine that we are creating a ‘layered architecture’ where the first layer is us, the tool builders (we must first understand what our tools are able to do). In the next layer we invite the experts who may help us develop the theory and the practice. I can imagine, for example, that a few researchers from a business school might join us, to learn about our tools first-hand. If a significant part of the communication of the future might indeed be federated, creating a suitable business model would be an interesting scholarly challenge leading to interesting entrepreneurial opportunities. And for us, a suitable business model would surely make it easier to bring knowledge federation into practical use. 

An even better mental image might be that we are creating a – federation! The members of our community will not lose their disciplinary identity by participating in our community. They will simply (and perhaps only temporarily) join the federation.

Understood in this way, knowledge federation will be a discipline in a similar way in which Nike is a company. It will be a brand and a way of working. Its people and activities will fluctuate according to needs.

An effect will be that we will instantiate a different way of communicating, which works across the silos.

You may now be thinking “Surely, this sounds like a useful thing to do, but that is not my job. The job of an academic researcher is to write research articles within his specialty. I will not get any academic credit for designing the way in which the knowledge federation community operates. 

I will again point out that there are many strings attached to our ‘candles’ way of doing things, and a number of obstacles to overcome. 

I predict, however, that this line of work will turn out to be an excellent investment of our time and resources, and that the future will redeem us. The belief that the job of a researcher is to ‘observe the world objectively’ has been successfully questioned in more than one way during the past century, as I tried to summarize in the second chapter of my book draft (see also Stephen Toulmin’s book “Return to Reason”). A reason why this beilef still persists in the academia is, well, of course, our already mentioned lack of communication... 

When the available epistemological and pragmatic insights are carefully considered (I have attempted to do some of that in my book), then we see that it is not altogether impossible that the task of designing a good way in which knowledge can be created and shared might eventually even be recognized as academically fundamental, or as ‘basic research.’

Please let me know what you think.

My warmest greetings,

Dino