A socio-technological approach to sharing knowledge across disciplines

The recent explosive growth of knowledge and its fragmentation into a constellation of fields and subfields, each with its specialised language, poses particular obstacles to knowledge sharing. Interdisciplinary language barriers reduce the impact of research work by preventing it from migrating across fields. They induce frequent reinventions of the wheel. They also hinder effective work on some of the most pressing contemporary research problems. The issue is especially tantalizing in the current era of the Internet. Never before have we had so much knowledge available at our fingertips; yet it remains extremely difficult to pinpoint and locate resources apt to satisfy our knowledge needs. In this thesis I conceptualise the problem of interdisciplinary knowledge sharing as a conflation of socio-cultural and technological problems, and I describe constraints that a successful solution path out of this situation ought to satisfy to be practical. I then propose and analyse a path towards enabling effective knowledge sharing between disciplines. This path is comprised of three interrelated World Wide Web-based technologies that represent successive steps towards a more coherent organisation of people and knowledge. These technologies are: personal knowledge publishing, open shared knowledge repositories , and navigable synthesis ontologies. I assess the effectiveness of the first two technologies based on case studies and surveys of people who have used such tools. I also report on my personal experience in building and using an interdisciplinary ontology. The results of these assessments indicate that personal knowledge publishing does in practice enable knowledge to flow more easily across disciplines by enabling strong relationships to be built between people who specialise in different areas. They also suggest that open shared knowledge repositories are a good way to organise research communities and bodies of knowledge around interdisciplinary themes. Finally, navigable synthesis ontologies appear to constitute an appropriate medium for linking together pieces of knowledge that are superficially different but carry the same deep structure, thus facilitating the transfer of ideas from one discipline to another.