KMi Publications

Tech Reports

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):
Download PDF

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
 
KMi Publications Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.