I am sitting the the SCOOP workshop of the JEM Network, which really shaping up nicely we have the MKM people meet with education and social software guys. I will blog a couple of impressions from the KWARC angle.
The discussion is quite stimulating.
Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen) gives an intro to Community Information Systems and claims that the constitutive features of CoPs are:
Mutual Engagement (ME): “You have to know which community you are belonging to”; I am a little sceptical whether this is really true for CoPs in Science which are very distributed, and may even be disconnected.
Joint Enterprize (JE): There is something you want to do together, and you want to learn to do it better. This is at the center at the CoP definition of Wenger. We have been neglecting this in our KWARC models here, or taking if for granted. We need to think more about this.
Joint Resources (JR): This is really where our MKM paper sits, and I have the feeling that we have something to bring to the table here. Klammer is interested in Multi-medial theories. I must say that with the OMDoc approach, we are interested in a Omni-Medial approach (OMDoc as a omnipresent semantic medium that covers all). The idea here is that the content Markup allows to generate multiple medial representations from this source and any media can be marked up to OMDoc. So maybe this is compatible.
Klamma also talks about a cross-media theory of transcription that sounds interesting (J”ager, Stanitzek Transkribieren – Media/Lecktu”ure 2002). The gist of it seems to be that events (e.g. historical) and objects are transcribed across media (e.g. to OMDoc or SciML). So we only have access to the media trace, not the event itself (it is long gone). I wonder what this theory predicts, it seems compatible with what we are doing.
A great example: The babylonian Thalmud has been transcribed to an XML markup, where you can annotate relations. Then the text can be acessed as semantic hypertext. One effect was that thalmud students were asking tougher questions earlier. That is very encouraging. I wonder if the sources are available for this, and how an OMDoc version of the thalmud would fare, and how much of the structure could be transferred in the CD-based structure we claim to be so essential.