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--Externalization, the crucial phase during which altogether new ideas emerge from
the community;
--Combination, when new ideas are combined with older and established ones for
innovation purposes.
On the other hand, while it is easy to identify a set of well-established technologies to
support Internalization, Socialization and Combination of knowledge, including e-
mail, corporate portals and groupware, so far nothing has been identified for Exter-
nalization. Generally speaking the attitude has been that we may hope that it will
happen, and that the right kind of corporate culture and innovation will be responsible
for creating favorable conditions for it. We want to show here that this does not have
to be the case. In fact, without performing any kind of magic, our cognitive prosthesis
will recognize ideas once they are likely to have been already produced in different
parts of the community that underlies the collective intelligence itself. Indeed, in a
collective intelligence new ideas are produced all the time, and they are immediately
internalized by being freely exchanged. Once we identify strong internalization and
socialization points that do not correspond to any so far known idea, then we have
found new ideas that need to be accounted for. Before showing how this can be done
we need, however, to extend the definition of community from its commonly under-
stood meaning, and relate it directly to the collective intelligence
par excellence
,
namely the Web. Furthermore, we need to define a minimal architecture for collective
intelligences, where abstraction capabilities for representing ideas are made available.
Fig. 1.
The knowledge spiral
2 A Minimal Architecture for Collective Intelligences
At the basis of our minimal architecture there are ontologies and communities.
Ontologies have since a long time provided a powerful tool to organize knowledge.
At a philosophical level, ontology is the most fundamental branch of metaphisics.
