What would science look like if it were invented today – part II: knowledge structuring
09.30.09 by Daniel Mietchen
Editor’s Note: This is the second of two parts of a guest post for the Euroscientist, the blog of Euroscience.org. Part I can be found here. FundScience.org cross-posts this article, as well as forthcoming installments, because of our passion to promote open science and collaboration, not only between scientists, but between the scientific community and the public.
Part II: What would knowledge structuring look like if it were invented today
Science is already a wiki if you look at it a certain way. It’s just a highly inefficient one — the incremental edits are made in papers instead of wikispace, and significant effort is expended to recapitulate existing knowledge in a paper in order to support the one to three new assertions made in any one paper. (John Wilbanks)
There are many ways to structure knowledge. One is via coordinated cellular activity in your brain. Others may involve spatial arrangements of sheets of paper or numeric arrangements of digital documents. Here, we will focus on the difference between the latter two, building on a previous outline.
Structuring scientific knowledge online
Let us first consider some practical aspects of organizing scientific knowledge in online environments:
- Newly incoming information can be inserted at any time later, independent of press runs — some call this micropublication. For example, part I of this post has already been “published” on the blog, but its wiki version can still be updated with references that were not available at the time. This may not be relevant for blog posts, but consider it as a proof of principle for writings in general, including scholarly reviews on a topic.
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