Mopsos

I just finished reading Sebastien's thesis "A Socio-Technical Approach To Sharing Knowledge Across Disciplines".

I think this is outstanding work. However, I have mixed feelings concerning chapter 5 about ontologies as a "unique possibility for connecting knowledge across discipline". It seems to me that these ontologies are precisely elaborated by knowledge workers who have already established contact as a way to structure the shared domain of knowledge that they have chosen to cultivate together. Ontologies are community tools, not individual ones, and they are often unrelated from one community to another. Hence, there is not always a "common ancestor" bridging two ontologies and allowing for interdisciplinary communication. When James Cook discovered New-Zealand, both communities – the crew and the natives – knew nothing about each other. They had to spend some time together before they could start to understand each other and capitalize this in the first English/Maori dictionary.

I see Communities of Practice as islands of structured knowledge. To discover the existence of a community by yourself, you must be prepared to "sail" and use many different methods of inquiry and semantic tools to succeed in your journey. To build a new community with a group of like-minded people, you first need to negotiate your common knowledge domain, your community and your shared practice.

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