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Abstract

We are seeing the transformation of knowledge from something that is primarily conveyed in paper formats into something else: a computable graph, in which the knowledge is written in formats that computers can understand and interconnect, based on the same technologies that underlie the internet and web. Paper technology simply contains expressions of ideas, but the very technology of paper makes *integration* of ideas very difficult, if not impossible.

Graphs allow ideas to "snap" together into larger and larger networks, which can in turn allow computers to help us interrogate the knowledge more effectively. There are competing technologies to achieve this, but the idea of "the paper" as the core container for knowledge is dying, and technology will be the killer. This transformation is happening first, like the transformation of documents to the Web, in the sciences.

The move to a computable graph as a knowledge storage technology holds enormous promise for e-Research. But this is "uncommon knowledge" - we've never dealt with knowledge this way, and it shows. We need new systems and new infrastructures to deal with this uncommon knowledge, and fulfill the promise of e-Research.

About the speaker

As VP of Science, John Wilbanks runs the Science Commons project at Creative Commons. He came to Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he founded and led to acquisition Incellico, a bioinformatics company that built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research & development. Before founding his company, John was the first Assistant Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and also worked in US politics as a legislative aide to U.S. Representative Fortney (Pete) Stark.

John holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Tulane University and studied modern letters at the Universite de Paris IV (La Sorbonne). He is a research affiliate at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the project on Mathematics and Computation. John also serves on the Advisory Boards of the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central, the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Open Knowledge Definition, and the International Advisory Board of the Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities awards. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Fedora Commons digital repository organization.

During 2008 John has been a Distinguished Visitor of QUT Law Faculty. We acknowledge the support of Professor Peter Coaldrake, Vice Chancellor of QUT, who has sponsored John’s visit to Australia to address OAR2008.