Abstract
In information systems that support knowledge-discovery applications
such as scientific exploration, reliance on highly structured
ontologies as data-organization aids can be limiting.With current
computational aids to science work, the human knowledge that creates
meaning out of analyses is often only recorded when work reaches publication—or
worse, left unrecorded altogether—for lack of an
ontological model for scientific concepts that can capture knowledge
as it is created and used. We argue for an approach to representing
scientific concepts that reflects (1) the situated processes of science
work, (2) the social construction of knowledge, and (3) the emergence
and evolution of understanding over time. In this model, knowledge
is the result of collaboration, negotiation, and manipulation by
teams of researchers. Capturing the situations in which knowledge
is created and used helps these collaborators discover areas of
agreement and discord, while allowing individual inquirers to maintain
different perspectives on the same information. The capture of
provenance information allows historical trails of reasoning to be
reconstructed, allowing end users to evaluate the utility and
trustworthiness of knowledge representations. We present a proof-of-concept
system, called Codex, based on this situated knowledge
model. Codex supports visualization of knowledge structures through
concept mapping, and enables inference across those structures.
The proof-of-concept is deployed in the domain of geoscience to support
distributed teams of learners and researchers.
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