hypothetical_scenario


 * Scenario for online community social knowledge sharing**

DRAFT IN PROGRESS

There seems to be the initial ingredients for a conversation about approaches to that are easy to use, and yet permit the easy creation and distribution of structured content. May we be able to build or aggregate tools that enable data to support the social and conversational aspects that seem integral to knowledge sharing (at least as understood from the perspecitve of the practice based theories discussed in this research)? 1158636908

Researchers in community driven metadata management for community portals point to the role of FOAF, and RSS, already widely used by some bloggers. vCard is widely used in social networking applications like LinkedIn ([|www.linkedin.com]). Community portals and social networking applications make use of simple ontologies like FOAF and vCard to structure metadata about people and their social connections, and this might be a small yet important part of online knowledge creation and sharing.

One aspect of the various tools considered in this, is the possible convergent functionality. Consider for example, LinkedIn's ([|www.linkedin.com] use of "keywords". When I click on keyword 'semantic' I am provided a page headed "Similar searches: ontology, rdf, semantic web". If I click the keyword 'melbourne' I get a different list, this time headed "Similar searches: sydney, australia, malaysia, oracle". [|LinkedIn] uses vCard, but (apparently) not FOAF. While tags are easy to create in Flickr™ ([]), Del.icio.us™ ([]), and CiteULike (http://www.citeulike.org) (i.e. social tagging applications), finding who knows who, or a user’s location, or affiliations is at best difficult and informal. While blogs have FOAF, and social networking service (sns) vCard, the social networking functionalities of ([|Del.icio.us]) is relatively weak.

In other words, there are functionalities in the various types of application (tagging, social networking, blogging) that are better in on than the other. How might this be of use, and how could we use it in the context of understanding communities and online knowledge sharing?

The story of the US Army's CompanyCommand Web portal places considerable emphasis on the authenticity of electronic conversations, within the portal. These conversations are about the professional practices of the Company Commander's who use the portal. Dixon et al., (2005) explain that the conversations are an important part of enabling community members to create and share knowledge. Another part of the CompanyCommand portal is the 'find an expert' function. ... 1158477754

Mika, Elfring, & Groenewegen, (2006) argue > The availability of a multitude of information sources provides the opportunity to obtain a complex view of the social network [within a community in a high technology domain, such as artificial intelligence or bioinformatics] and thereby it increases the robustness and reliability of research designs. In particular, by decreasing our reliance on the **single sources** of information our findings become less prone to the errors in the individual sources of information. However, the availability of a number of data sources also poses a previously unmet challenge, namely the aggregation of information originating from heterogeneous information sources not primarily created for the purposes of network analysis. (Mika, Elfring, & Groenewegen, 2006, intro. sect., empahsis added).

In other words, if information was semantically structured, and human's who produce or tag or cite the information were semantically linked (eg. by FOAF, and the humans had profiles that were dynamically updated, as their networks of tags, and social 'connections' grew, then perpahs we could have online enviroments where conversations and tags were part of an integrated whole. This is an idea appraoching the vision of the Cluetrain Manifesto cluetrain_manifesto (Levine, Locke, Searls, & Weinberger, 2000), in which all (or most) of the information is interconnected. What's needed is a scenario of technologies that make the interconns east to create!


 * Referenes**

Levine, R., Locke, C., Searls, D., & Weinberger, D. (2000). //The cluetrain manifesto: The end of business as usual//. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.