BUILDING AUGMENTED KNOWLEDGE ARCHITECTURES: REQUIREMENTS FOR COLLABORATION PLATFORMS OF NEXT-GEN CONCEPT ORGANIZATION TOOLS

Computer enhanced technology gives us access to collective knowledge that needs to be contextualized, personalized, and reorganized. This is a major task for next generation learners and knowledge workers for whom producing, digesting and presenting information makes sense in personal problem solving contexts. Personal ways of knowledge acquisition and its cooperatively manageable organization represent meta-information concerning the problem situation that determines the conceptual structure of the problem space. Representation of the search for information and its conceptual organization provide keys to problem definition and consequently to its solution. We reconsider concept organization and visual knowledge representation tools that augment human problem solving. By “augmented knowledge architectures” we refer to Douglas C. Engelbart’s (1962) conceptual framework for augmenting human intellect.
The paper argues that in order to realize the potential of human-computer interactions for building augmented knowledge architectures we need to develop platforms for cooperative problem solvers along the lines of a ‘Wikipedia of Concepts’. Analyzing next generation techniques such as Google’s Knowledge Graph and existing relational representations and visualizations of knowledge structures we make explicit proactive requirements for next generation platforms, called “Conceptipedia”, in the spirit of Engelbart’s original approach.
Conceptipedia is constituted as a graph of ‘Things’ that enables us to define relations between concepts within a meta-knowledge graph. Whereas Wikipedia is a web of hyper-linked pages, Conceptipedia is a hyper-wiki that can also be modeled as an ontology for defining aspects and new relationships between concepts and things via navigable hyper-links. It is a collaboration platform for building Knowledge Graphs by researching, exploring, capturing, articulating, mapping and visualizing concepts and their various relationships. We illustrate the advantages of such a platform with the use cases of the already existing personal knowledge organization tool: WikiNizer, a Wiki like orgaNizer of one’s Personal Knowledge Repository. We demonstrate that satisfying the proactive requirements it can also be used as a tool for visualizing the development of problem specific conceptual relations of the creative mind and one’s related web research.