the swarm intelligence: social construction models of knowledge. digital libraries, a case of study

4th National Conference of Postgraduates in Cognitive Sciences“Mind, language, evolution” June, 7-9 2010

The Swarm Intelligence: social construction models of knowledge. Digital libraries, a case of study.

Karim Ben Hamida ([email protected])Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophical and Social SciencesUniversity of Rome Tor Vergata

Index

• Aim of paper• Theoretical framework• The swarm intelligence• Digital library• Taxonomy vs. folksonomy• Conclusion

June 8th 2010 24th CODISCO "Mind, language, evolution"

The Swarm Intelligence: social construction models of knowledge

Aim of paper

• Exploring the concept of ‘swarm intelligence’ and its application to the emerging KO models on the web

• Focusing on key issues about Digital Libraries as regards KO in the digital age

• Going deeper into social and epistemological aspects of opposite information classification systems

• Approaching topics with a cross-domain point of view, (philosophy of language, sociology of culture and KO)



Theoretical framework - key concepts

• Internet and the World Wide Web• The social web evolution• The Swarm intelligence• The Digital library• Folksonomies and taxonomies



Internet and the World Wide Web

From Mattelart’s vision, Internet and the World Wide Web are not just a technological innovation of XXth century.

Despite their recent birth, Internet and WWW would bethe result of a long and complex cultural process, began atthe origin of modernity.



Internet and the World Wide Web ICT would continue the philosophical exploit of thinkers, like Leibniz and Bacon, aimed to realize an “automatization of reason”. (Mattelart A., Histoire de la société de l’information, Editions La Découverte, 2009)



Internet

• A sort of completion of the following theoretical progresses:

Leibniz: the binary logic Bacon: the useful science

• Internet protocols: the engineering effort to build up a universal language, based on:

the “mystic of number” the liberation of Science from idola fori

(A. Mattelart, Histoire de la société de l’information, Editions La Découverte, 2009)



The World Wide Web

• The net model: a mashup of two perspectives of the XIXth european social philosophy:

The organic society from Saint Simon’s concept The anarchist and decentralized society according to

Fourier and Proudhon visions



The old social Web

• Web 1.0 has been created by an élite, a narrowed group of technicians and scientistis.

• “Web 1.0 was all about connecting people”

(Berners-Lee T., IBM podcast developerWorks interviews, http://tinyurl.com/2byhfr, Aug 22th 2006)



The new social Web

• Web 2.0 is a network made of people for people. • “Web as interaction between people is really what the

Web is. That was what it was designed to be as a collaborative space where people can interact”

• A digital mass community• Social networks evolve in social media

(Berners-Lee T., IBM podcast developerWorks interviews, http://tinyurl.com/2byhfr, Aug 22th 2006)



The Swarm Intelligence

• Developed in AI domain, SI describes the collective behaviour of small, self-organized and highly entropic systems (both natural and artificial)

• From robotic systems to natural contexts, SI became the new social intelligence paradigm

(Beni G, Wang J., “Swarm Intelligence in Cellular Robotic Systems, Proceed. NATO Advanced Workshop on Robots and Biological Systems”, 1989)



The Swarm Intelligence

Useful to: • describe changings in the digital media environment• enlighten interesting phenomena related to the

emergence of collective aggregated identities:

– Digital agents as prosumers– Liquid and gridded hyper-culture– Crisis of the traditional cultural space as a whole– Rising of a dis-objectivated knowledge (distributed, plural and

nomadic)



Digital library

• A controversial and provisional concept (liquid architecture)• A hyper-text management model of documents• Should not be overlapped with the Nelson Docuverse concepts• From an epistemological point of view, DL is a conceptual

device aimed to organize, classify, distribute and preserve knowledge within the digital space

(Nelson T., Literary machines 90.1: Xanadu project, Mindful Press, Sausalito, California1981)



Digital library

• Digital information environment based on two opposite models of knowledge organization:– Top-down (taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies)– Bottom-up (folksonomies)

• Each one belongs to a different build-up approach regarding the knowledge foundations



Digital library

• Top-down classification models: formalist wave (hierarchical method)

• Bottom-up systems: naturalist trend (horizontal/’popular’ method)



Taxonomy vs Folksonomy

• They could be considered as the reflections of two different philosophical approaches to language studies:

– Formalism (logical positivism/first Wittgenstein)– Ordinary language philosophy (second Wittgenstein)



Conclusion

• Which kind of knowledge model is emerging in cyberspace?

• Is there the possibility of a ‘peaceful coexistence’ or integration between different KO models in DL?

• The social media growth is transforming the web in a new Babel tower?



Thank you for your kind attention!

For any question don’t hesitate to contact me by email karim.benhamida [at] gmail.com

Credits for photos in Creative Commons:• JoonYoung.Kin (http://tinyurl.com/35npojy)• Fred Cavazza (http://tinyurl.com/595jhr)• Documentally (http://tinyurl.com/2w5jmg4)• Calbara87 (http://tinyurl.com/377f6cz)



the swarm intelligence: social construction models of knowledge. digital libraries, a case of study

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