Knowledge, knowledge everywhere - but how to organise it efficiently?

Florence Devouard started her talk by giving an overview of Wikipedia, an online dynamic knowledge database that is being created simultaneously by many users. This encyclopedia is a unique knowledge sharing venture on the internet which has created a network of virtual communities brought together by a common goal. Anyone and everyone can contribute to content in this encyclopedia and as a result Wikipedia is constantly being rewritten and edited online. This has opened up the potential for a world in which every individual can have access to what electronic media is able to represent of the sum of human knowledge. The invention of the first printing press was an important milestone permitting the writings of one author to be read by many. The electronic media have exponentially expanded the circle of recipients. However in addition, a paradigm shift is now occurring as the interactivity of the internet allows authors and readers to adopt interchangeable roles.  Devouard also emphasized the importance of retaining the rich variety of different points of view for the principle of collaborative knowledge to remain valid. She underlined her own view of how conflict could be mitigated if everyone were to understand and tolerate the fact that sometimes different people or different cultures can have different views on the same issue, without these views necessarily being translatable to a linear scale of right and wrong. Exposing such cultural differences of interpretation can be very significant for identifying the underlying causes of misunderstanding. She acknowledged however, that the proper classification of knowledge and systematic deposition of fact and opinion remain essential.

The changing characteristics of the web and how collective knowledge could be accessed more efficiently were addressed by the other two speakers in their talks about the semantic web and the semantic space. Coming from a mathematical and computer science perspective, Wendy Hall, of the University of Southampton, UK, explained how information is currently stored and presented by our "state of the art" machines. She pointed out that whereas human brains have an inherent capacity to handle data very efficiently, the scenario is different in the world of computers. She likened the first computers to filing cabinets, storing information in separate files. This evolved into accumulated collections of documents on the web. All such objects on the web then became gradually connected to each other through a network of simple links of one document to another. By adding a "semantic" link, which explains why the connection has been made, another fractal level of information can be added, which would greatly increases the searcher's ability to retrieve the subset of information most appropriate to his or her initial aim. This would allow us to connect the current web of documents into a web of the individual units of data with each document. This is the phenomenon which Hall calls the semantic web or Web3.0.

Pierre Lévy from the University of Ottawa, Canada articulated his philosopher's perspective of the idea of a semantic space. In his opinion it could be beneficial for humanity to develop new symbolic tools for exploiting the digital memory of mankind that is already present on the web today. Ideally, this would allow us to improve our fragmented, collective cognition into a self-referencing, reflective cognition. Similarly to the way that the development of language allowed human beings to evolve a reflective capacity, he thinks we now need to define a new form of language to describe and link information on the web in a way that allows it to evolve a reflective capacity. For this, Prof. Lévy envisions a universal language, a uniform semantic locator (USL), which can be read by computers, but which would interface with every human being in their own language. It would then be possible to take the huge computing power already at our disposal to create semantic links between the data present in the universal memory of all interconnected documents and thus help people to exchange knowledge in a reciprocally satisfying way. In a comment from the audience, Joël de Rosnay added an interesting facet to these reflections, asking the speaker to speculate about whether we might then also link personalities, documents and emotion in virtual space, by adding universal human personality tags.

Broadening the scope of these technical considerations, issues of cultural and socio-political implications as well as the emergence of new business models were raised. The issue of how to extend the potential for all human beings to connect to (and contribute to) our virtual repositories of collective intelligence was discussed and the practical example of how the diminishing costs and increasing availability of mobile-phones has facilitated access to Wikipedia in the developing world was cited to illustrate the possibility of creating new virtual communities linking people in modern cities with villagers in rural areas. Social scientists could help engineers understand better which technologies might be successfully introduced and how users might develop them further - insights which often come as a surprise to the computer scientists. In a global society, thought by many to have become overly-polarized towards a financial profit based model, the question of future incentives for knowledge accumulation and classification into a semantic web become an interesting and difficult sociological problem; part of those issues which each member of the collective called humanity has a responsibility to struggle with throughout his life, rather than simply relinquishing the job to his or her political representatives. The combined balance of the choice we each make, either to take on this responsibility or to shun it, may bare on whether humankind has a future within the scale of timespan which we can easily comprehend. Will we see only new business models arising to generate greater polarization of financial revenue from the collective knowledge, or might we envisage a gradual shift from monetary-based compensation to non-monetary transactions using an exchange of attention or expertise? Such questions exist now. The answers still lie in the future and depend on choices that each of us must make for themselves.