Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
technologies link us directly to the work undertaken by Webble World researchers,
which we now address.
7
Knowledge Federation, Webble Worlds, Pervasive
Computing Environments, and Other New Technologies
for BoK 2.0
Those involved in the NSF Funded research on GIS&T BoK 2.0 are to be congratu-
lated on their visionary proposal. The use of immersive environments, such as Second
Life, has great potential to enhance the GIScience learning environment. The BoK 2.0
is unlikely to be completed any sooner than 2014 and if it is to have at least a six-year
shelf life then it will have to serve the GIScience community to 2020 and beyond at
which time we can expect that technology will have made significant new advances.
It is to these newly emerging technologies that we now turn.
We begin with a discussion of Yuzuru Tanaka's meme media technology [33]. It is
quite remarkable that while Professor Tanaka has demonstrated the usefulness of his
meme media technology and its subsequent technological developments in integrating
GIS, the GIS community involved in the BoK 1.0 and 2.0 research appears unaware
of the usefulness of his recent research in promoting the integration of a Body of GIS-
cience knowledge. A particularly lucid discussion of the main aspects of these devel-
opments is to be found in Tanaka et al. [32]. In this paper he described how their
meme media computing technologies could be used to make the Web work as a
pervasive computing environment (PCE). This approach, which is now being advo-
cated for use in the development of GIS&T BoK 2.0, is described by Tanaka and his
colleagues as an open system of computing resources where developers can interac-
tively select these resources to complete tasks. The PCE is designed to leverage a
knowledge federation. A federation describes a set of digital resources that are not
assumed, a priori, to be interoperable. A knowledge federation is defined as a set of
document based computing resources. In Tanaka et al. [32] case studies are often web
based but the authors cite previous knowledge federations of scientific simulations,
digital libraries and research activities. All three, but especially the latter two, will be
of considerable interest to the developers of BoK 2.0. Although there are two types of
federation research, first, those that involve service providing and service consuming
programs usually over the web and, second, federations that are user defined, Tanaka
et al. [32] facilitate the less commonly studied user defined federations. Indeed the
meme media's IntelligentPad use of slots to provide interoperability resonates with
Ahearn et al.'s [2] advocacy of structuring the BoK's knowledge referencing system
with identity and similarity sockets.
Examples of linking the meme media knowledge federation to legacy applications
including 2D GIS and 3D geographical simulations are described by Tanaka et al.
[32]. More recently Tanaka and his colleagues have extended their work on meme
media into what they now refer to as Webble World technology. Webbles are meme
media objects that incorporate the generic behavior common to all such objects as
well as specialized behaviors specific to a given Webble but, more importantly, they
are now customizable [22], [23]. It is to be hoped that extensions of meme media as
