Shum, Simon B.

Abstract: In this chapter, we outline a project which traces its source of inspiration back to the grand visions of Vannevar Bush (scholarly trails of linked concepts), Doug Engelbart (highly interactive intellectual tools, particularly for argumentation), and Ted Nelson (large scale internet publishing with recognised intellectual property). In essence, we are tackling the age-old question of how to organise distributed, collective knowledge. Specifically, we pose the following question as a foil:In 2010, will scholarly knowledge still be published solely in prose, or can we imagine a complementary infrastructure that is ‘native’ to the emergingsemantic, collaborative web, enabling more effective dissemination and analysis of ideas?We are neither trying to replace textual narrative as an expressive medium, nor itsproducts such as books and peer reviewed publications. We seek instead to augment them by exploiting globally networked information in ways that – precisely because of its historical pedigree – the venerable prose publication cannot support. Conventional scholarly publications are the way they are through a co-evolution of notational form with print publishing technology, but are not designed in any way to take advantage of today’s information infrastructure. Still at a relatively early stage, our project is bringingto bear on this challenge a networked representational environment (a digital libraryserver based on an argumentation ontology (Buckingham Shum et al., 2000), semanticweb services (e.g. ontology-based reasoning, Li et al., 2002), and recent work on distributed collective practices (why and when individuals in a community of practice are willing to subscribe to a shared repository, and role of formalism, BuckinghamShum et al., 2002). All of these must be interacted with via a variety of user interfaces, of which a key component will be renderings of the network of argumentative claims—the focus of this chapter.

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