Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 6.
Knowledge creation at work
4 Conclusions
We have formally defined the functioning of a cognitive prosthesis to boost concept
discovery in collective intelligences, with the objective to transfer at the collective
level the human capability to innovate. We are currently experimenting our approach
in the perspective of meeting the marketing needs of corporations in the age of Web
2.0 and of empowered customer and user groups, as described in [13], and of support-
ing user-driven product innovation [9,10].
We conclude by replying to an obvious question: how does this fit with the Seman-
tic Web project http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/, that, since its inception at the very
beginning of the new millenium, aims at making the Web fully “understandable” by
software agents through the annotation of Web content with ontologies?
By and large we view the Semantic Web as fitting with our vision and objectives,
and we believe that its full realization will lead to the creation of a federation of ad-
vanced collective intelligences effectively marking the threshold for the Collective
Intelligence era. We are proposing, however, an alternative to its current methods,
which amount essentially to involving communities in the manual creation of meta-
content in the form of ontologies and concept taxonomies. By contrast, we view
communities as much better fitted at producing content rather than meta-content: this
is the primeval impulse of human creativity that gets naturally boosted and multiplied
through digital connectivity, as demonstrated by the explosive growth of Web 2.0
⎯
namely the Web of blogs, social networks and personal spaces.
By providing a way to automatically co-evolve communities and ontologies, our
framework can be exploited to automate the creation of a “meta-web” where the bur-
den of semantic annotations is taken away from the users communities, and newly
inserted concepts effectively correspond to genuine innovation, as captured and
