Knowledge Communities in Grey

The dynamic nature of modern human social interactions, and the increasing capability of wireless and mobile devices for creating and sharing contents, open up the opportunity for a wide dissemination of information through complex knowledge sharing systems. The development of digital technologies and the continuous evolution of telecommunication networks are rapidly heading our society towards a culture of participation and to a more and more interactive communication. Adaptive networking protocols and data management systems are fostering pervasive information and communication environments. In this context, subject based communities offer the steadily increasing availability of ubiquitous accessible information. Networking communities, focussed on supporting relationships and content sharing, act at the same time as providers and users of all kind of grey literature materials in a highly distributed and collaborative scenario. Collaboration networks are thus becoming a key element in the advancement and dissemination of knowledge in scientific domains as well as in diverse aspects of everyday human life. In this sense, social media at best enhance new frontier ideas and highly innovative contents; they offer the enormous potential to transform research, and research results, into a knowledge co-creation process. As the shared knowledge components build cognitive ties, there is no real sharing of knowledge without a common understanding of it. Large amounts of structured information have to be managed, and generation and assimilation of knowledge have to be facilitated. The unlimited universe of data and information available on the web need to be identified, classified, analyzed, filtered, so as to enhance the generation and assimilation of new knowledge. Knowledge needs to be represented, standardized and distilled from multiple sources. Tagging on a web scale provides a potentially useful source of metadata, and paves the way to automated post-processing services such as information retrieval, and acquisition of concepts from large document repositories. In other words it creates an environment conducive to knowledge transfer. In the full version, particular emphasis will be laid on technologies in natural language understanding and knowledge management for providing structured, intelligent access to the continuously evolving content generated on-line in a pervasive collaborative environment. In particular, the work will focus on exploring the interaction/synergy between different modes/tools for knowledge acquisition and representation: from highly structured, standardized and objective knowledge information systems based on ontological hierarchies and relations to more dynamic, subjective tools for volatile knowledge representation such as word clouds and concept maps. This approach will highlight current automated tools for concept acquisition and ontology learning that are conducive to an incremental approach to content access and management, to establish a fruitful bridge between modes of knowledge sharing/creation and dynamic, incremental approaches to automated knowledge acquisition and representation.