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Tech Report kmi-10-01 Abstract


Boundary Infrastructures for IBIS Federation: Design Rationale, Implementation, and Evaluation
Techreport ID: kmi-10-01
Date: 2010
Author(s):
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Climate change is a growing concern to humankind, since the dominant view argues for rapid, significant changes in human behavior to avert catastrophic consequences. This is a complex problem, known as a wicked problem. A productive way forward is through creative, critical dialogue. Such dialogue requires new kinds of socio-technical infrastructure. We offer a socio-technical infrastructure, described as a boundary infrastructure, based on improvements to existing and emerging Issue-based Information Systems (IBIS) conversation platforms. IBIS is an emerging lingua franca of structured discourse. We survey a rich field of literature related to ecologies for human-computer collaboration, conversation, communications theory, scientific discovery, knowledge representation and organization, and software development. Our goal is to facilitate the elicitation of numerous IBIS conversations, seeking a large variety of opinions, facts, and world views; our contribution lies in a process of federation of those IBIS conversations. Our work entails the fabrication of a prototype collective intelligence platform we call Bloomer. Bloomer includes an IBIS conversation federation component, and will be disseminated to several communities of practice, particularly those engaged in activities related to climate change.

Publication(s):

Park, J. (2010). Boundary Infrastructures for IBIS Federation: Design Rationale, Implementation, and Evaluation. Thesis Proposal, available as: Technical Report KMI-10-01, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK. http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/pdf/kmi-10-01.pdf
 
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Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities