Towards Solving the Interdisciplinary Language Barrier Problem
The problem of communicating across disciplines is becoming increasingly acute. The growth and diversification of knowledge means that each discipline has a grasp on an ever-diminishing part of the total sum of knowledge, and that specialists will face the threat of irrelevance as the important problems of this world become more and more interdisciplinary. In this article I argue that a possible solution to this situation is to collectively pool and carefully organize the analogies that each one of us is able to identify between concepts that belong to different disciplines. These analogies serve as bridges that allow us to cross over to a different field of knowledge with considerably less effort.
Of course it's an idealistic proposition that I don't expect will be implemented anytime soon. Territoriality and the lack of external incentives to build bridges pose a serious obstacle to its realization. But I think it's technically feasible using today's technology. What is needed is that enough internally motivated people who wish to commit to this worthy cause manage to find each other.
There is of course a parallel between this and the issue of interoperability between computer systems. The solution is basically the same: building specifications that systems can commit to while preserving their independence. In some areas these are called ontologies. What is not emphasized enough regarding ontologies in my opinion is how much building them is a social negotiation process and an endeavor towards mutual understanding .
Towards Solving the Interdisciplinary Language Barrier Problem on arXiv.org
Abstract:
This work aims to make it easier for a specialist in one field to find and explore ideas from another field which may be useful in solving a new problem arising in his practice. It presents a methodology which serves to represent the relationships that exist between concepts, problems, and solution patterns from different fields of human activity in the form of a graph. Our approach is based upon generalization and specialization relationships and problem solving. It is simple enough to be understood quite easily, and general enough to enable coherent integration of concepts and problems from virtually any field. We have built an implementation which uses the World Wide Web as a support to allow navigation between graph nodes and collaborative development of the graph. "
(The paper has not been published but was mentioned in the Complexity Digest.)
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:26:21 PM.
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